Pride and Prejudice 41-45: “So What Is The Truth?”
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Philosophy, but make it chaos! Lauren and Emily talk about how truth is constructed and why it's maybe – possibly – probably – fake. Also included: travel plans, siblings, and the nightmares of socially anxious people.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Truth coming out of her well to shame mankind
Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? (WARNING for flashing gif upon opening link.)
Show Notes
As you listen to this episode, please just have this GIF in the back of your mind, playing on a loop. It’s the only thought that was in our brains.
Lauren would additionally like to blame her excessive energy on the fact that the day of recording was the first time she had felt human in three days. Down with (the) sickness.
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane S2E9 | Pride and Prejudice 41-45: “So What Is The Truth?”
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 41 through 45 of Pride and Prejudice with a focus on truth.
Okay. So now that the letter is well and truly behind us, we're able to kind of move on to see how Elizabeth is going to deal with, you know, the processing of all this new information as she gets--
Emily: the fallout.
Lauren: --as several new wrenches are kind of thrown into her life over the course of five chapters.
Emily: It's a toolbox in here.
Lauren: Poor thing, just when she thought like, okay, you know what? That was a really tumultuous time in my life,
Emily: but it's past me,
Lauren: it's past me. You know, I'm going to move forward. Jane's going to move forward. Everything's going to be fine. And then her life was just like, you thought! You thought this was going to be easy.
30-Second Recaps
Emily: All right, Lauren, are you ready to recap these five chapters of Pride and Prejudice?
Lauren: I hope so.
Emily: All right, we're going anyway.
Lauren: Okay. Let's do it.
Emily: Three. Two. One. Go.
Lauren: Okay. Lydia is invited to go to Brighton with Mrs. Forster, who is a younger woman who just got married. And so not a very good influence. Lydia is delighted.
Elizabeth is horrified, but she goes anyway. Elizabeth decides that she's going to be able to go on a trip with her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners. They're going to go up-- it turns out that they go to Derbyshire, which is where? The home of Pemberley. So they go to visit Pemberley, Darcy's there, Elizabeth is horrified.
She meets Bingley and Caroline again, Caroline is petty as usual, and she also meets Georgiana Darcy who was lovely.
Emily: Ding, ding, ding.
Lauren: I feel like that was not so bad.
Emily: That was not so bad.
Lauren: Okay. Good. Okay. Ready for your thirty-second recap.
Emily: Ready.
Lauren: On your mark. Get set. [00:02:00] Go.
Emily: Lydia is going with the Forsters to follow the militia down to Brighton.
Elizabeth is horrified and tries to warn her father a little bit with Georgiana's experience in mind. But nothing will sway them and Lydia's off to make a fool of herself. After that the Gardiners Elizabeth's aunt and uncle come and take her on their planned trip which has been altered so that now they're going to Derbyshire where they find Pemberley and the Darcy's.
That was not good.
Lauren: That's okay. It was more detailed in the beginning.
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: So you filled in the gaps of what I left out.
Emily: You got the later details. I got the earlier details.
Lauren: Exactly. I failed to say that they're following the militia. I just said that Lydia went to Brighton with another silly young woman of her acquaintance.
Section Recap (And That’s What You Missed on Glee)
Emily: So let's, let's start there because this is where our chapters open is with Lydia utterly delighted that she has been invited to go along with Mrs. Forster, who, as Lauren said, is a very young and very recently married woman whose husband is an officer. So there is absolutely no chance that she will be any kind of mitigating influence on Lydia's wildness.
So Elizabeth is just, she's hearing alarm bells in her head like this, this cannot end well at the very best case scenario is that all of Brighton is like, oh, that girl's a fool.
Lauren: And it even says that they've only known each other for three months. And of those three months they've only been close for two. So it's not as though they have a deep understanding of one another, but Mr. Bennet is not really disposed to do anything about it. He pretty much tells Elizabeth, you know, Lydia is not going to rest until she makes a fool of herself publicly. And this is the most controlled environment we're going to get for her to make a fool of herself.
And at least it's not here in town. So just let her go. Let her go be silly. And it will be fine.
Emily: [00:04:00] If she's going to do it. It might as well be around strangers. Right?
Lauren: Exactly. And he thinks that Colonel Forster is going to keep her in line. Elizabeth is not convinced. And with still like a little bit of the sting of Darcy's letter in mind is trying to make her father think about like, don't you think it would also reflect poorly on like the rest of us if she goes and makes a fool out of herself for everyone to see and her father again, Perhaps being a little bit willfully ignorant of the world around him. It's just like, well, you and Jane are always going to be respected wherever you go. So it shouldn't really matter if you have very silly sisters, it'll be fine.
Emily: We're seeing for the first time now in the aftermath of Darcy's letter, Elizabeth having the kind of foresight about the social consequences of her family's behavior, how it can actually have real impacts on her life and Jane's and for the others as well. You know, more directly because the younger girls are the ones who are being silly, I guess.
But it's not just confined to them and she's kind of realizing that she can't just be a bystander to that. It can actually have some kind of fallout on her.
Lauren: I think we're seeing again, Elizabeth had known this about her family before, but now she has that added perspective of looking at it partially through Darcy's perspective, in a way, and is able to look and see, oh, now I understand what it was.
He was, I still don't like it. It still hurts my pride a little bit that he would dig at my family, but like, aw hell, he might've had a point.
Emily: Yeah. So Lydia is set to leave for Brighton, but there is one final encounter with Wickham before the militia goes and Lizzie is not charmed.
Lauren: No.
Emily: She's like seeing right past the mask into all of these affectations and [00:06:00] his general charm and says, "she lost all concern for him in finding herself selected as the object of such idle and frivolous gallantry. And while she steadily repressed it, could not but feel the reproof contained in his believing that however long and for whatever cause his attentions had been withdrawn, her vanity would be gratified and her preference secured at any time by their renewal." So basically. No matter why and for how long he ignored her, just by cranking up the charm, once again in her direction, she's obviously going to fall right back into his arms and she's just like, excuse you, the audacity.
Lauren: That is not how this works. The nerve, the gall, the gumption. No. And also is dropping little nuggets of information throughout the conversation to see how he reacts. He's not the only one who's at this dinner. There's, you know, several members of the, of the regiment who've come to Longbourne for dinner. Wickham is one of them and--
Emily: she's not about to make a scene, but still.
Lauren: But she still wants, you know, some points to be made just to, just kind of. Poke a little bit at Wickham just to see what he does because she can't really expose everything, but she also can't leave it alone. And she's determined that they're not going to part like on a good note.
Emily: She has to let him know that he's not in her good graces anymore.
Lauren: She mentioned that while they were in Hunsford that Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr. Darcy spent three weeks at Rosings. And Wickham goes, "oh. Interesting." She's like, "do you, do you know, Colonel Fitzwilliam by any chance, you know, does that name ring a bell?"
And he goes, you know, "I think so, his manners are a lot different than his cousin's, though, aren't they?" Trying to like, make sure that they're still cool about disliking Darcy and Elizabeth says, "yeah, but you know, I think that Darcy improves the more you get to know him" and Wickham's face is like what? What do you mean you think he improves? I thought we were united on this. I thought we both hated this guy.
Emily: He makes some comment about. [00:08:00] How oh, wow. I hope that that Darcy really has improved, like as a person and Elizabeth responds, "oh no, in essentials, I believe he is very much what he ever was," which just, I, I had to cackle at that, like actually no underneath he's exactly the same.
And she clarifies, "when I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that either his mind or manners were in a state of improvement, but that from knowing him better, his disposition was better understood."
Lauren: And then Wickham's reaction, it says, "Wickham's alarm now appeared in a heightened complexion and agitated look. For a few minutes, he was silent till, shaking off his embarrassment, he turned to her again and said in the gentlest of accents," like. Let's see, it's like trying to calm the skittish horse. You can see the alarm in his face and he's like, let's see if I can bring this back to like safer ground here. And he basically says you who understand so well that like, I really don't like Mr. Darcy, you must know how happy I am that he at least knows now to get the appearance of doing the right thing. Still trying to make Elizabeth think that like, oh no, no, no, you don't actually understand him. He just now understands how to make you think that he's a nice person, but he's not a nice person, but is clearly thrown off by Elizabeth statement and realizing that he no longer controls the narrative of Darcy in her head.
Emily: Yeah. And even though he doesn't have explicit confirmation that Darcy's taken Elizabeth into any kind of confidence, because really he has no reason to expect that Darcy would, but still just the fact that Elizabeth, who previously had seemed to share his dislike so strongly has now kind of changed her tune on Darcy's general countenance must be a little bit panic inducing.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: Oh, oh wait. I, my hold wasn't as strong as I thought it was. I mean, it's kind of [00:10:00] an abuse tactic as well. You know, like you said, controlling the narrative, but as soon as there is some kind of outside input, you can lose that really fast. Which is why it's an abuse tactic to have complete control over someone's understanding of a situation or, you know, the world at large.
Lauren: And so, so much happening with truth in the section. This was another one where I was like there's so many things that we can talk about and just like, we'll have to backtrack and go back to some of it later, but it's just like, oh my gosh, there's so much to talk about with truth.
Emily: But, with that, Lydia is gone, the militia is gone. Wickham is gone and Lizzie's like, well, at least I never have to think about him anymore.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: But then we got what I thought was a really interesting little meditation on the relationship between the Bennet parents and Elizabeth recognizing and admitting that she has recognized for a long time how i nsufficient a partner her father has been to her mother. Because apparently, and I know way back in like the first or second episode of Pride and Prejudice, I was like, oh, that's kinda sweet. You know, they're still flirting, but now Elizabeth is coming out right and saying like, actually Mr. Bennet was just like, Ooh, she's young and hot. And they got married and immediately he found out that she was just young and hot. There is nothing to back it up and lost all respect for his own wife, which is really sad. And Elizabeth contemplates the effect that that dysfunction has had on their daughters. When her father has done nothing to protect his own wife from, you know, the contempt of their children or even of the larger neighborhood.
And as we've seen, has also participated in, in that kind of mocking her and just generally being really [00:12:00] open about the fact that he doesn't respect his wife at all.
Lauren: Right. He's checked out of the marriage. He's checked out of raising their children. He just has decided that he's going to let it go cause he doesn't respect his wife.
And you would think that maybe would have more concern given that he doesn't have respect for his wife, that he would be more concerned with how his wife is raising their children, but doesn't seem to muster any care for that at all, either, he just kind of lets it go. As we just saw with Lydia where Elizabeth was trying to say, this is a moment where you can step in and be a parent and prevent this from happening and like, make sure you save the reputation of every woman in your family. And he's like, eh.
Emily: Well, I mean, even that's a kind of dynamic that I think we've talked about before, where women, where the, the mother or the female head of the household was responsible for the children. They really weren't the concern of the male head of household.
So yeah, socially. Mr. Bennet having interest in nothing but his books and his land is totally above board. But yeah, it was interesting to see Elizabeth critiquing that and sort of not explicitly, but kind of coming into the conclusion. Maybe that that's not really good way to be. That's not a good partnership to be.
Lauren: And perhaps thinking too about like what she would want out of her own partnership in the future, like, Hmm. Okay. Well, I do not want a husband who's going to just kind of leave me high and dry, but nor would that be the case for her, depending on who she marries, because she's not her mother at all. She has her own intellect and her own, you know, something else to bring to the table other than beauty. Which is in the eye of the beholder and often fades.
Emily: That actually made me think as much as everyone likes to compare Lydia and Mrs. Bennet, Lydia is a lot more like her [00:14:00] father than anyone seems to acknowledge either. Cause she's, she's doing the same kind of running after youth and beauty with no thought for, okay. What comes next?
Lauren: Oh, I hadn't thought about that. That's a good point.
Emily: It may just be that one thing, but
Lauren: It's a pretty significant one thing.
Emily: Yeah, she may, she may have her mother's temperament, but her father's decision-making tendencies, perhaps at least in partnerships.
Lauren: She has her father's taste.
Emily: Yes. We'll see how that turns out.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: Fortunately, it's not long before Lizzie has something else to claim her attention as Mr. And Mrs. Gardiner arrive to take her away.
Lauren: Their tour kind of got a little bit thrown off. So they were meant to be going on like this wide ranging Northern tour, but then they were delayed by a couple of weeks.
And then that meant that they couldn't go too far. And so, you know, they figured, okay, we'll give up, they were going to go see the lakes. And so instead they just create a shorter tour where they're going to go up to Derbyshire, which is the most significant part of this tour for our purposes.
Emily: Oh, yes. Yeah. I love that Lizzie's so disappointed. They're only going to have a three week vacation, man. What I wouldn't do for a three week vacation.
Lauren: She was just on vacation. She just got back.
Emily: Right? Woman. Your whole life is vacation.
Lauren: But of course, Elizabeth hears the name of the county that they're going to and immediately is like--
Emily: Pemberley? Darcy?
Lauren: Right? Her ears perk up. And then she goes, oh wait, no. Oh no, I can't go there. I can't be seen.
Emily: Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.
Lauren: Oh, she basically says, you know, "but surely I may enter his county with impunity and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me." like I can go in and out. He'll never have to know.
Emily: I could go [00:16:00] sightseeing. There's nothing wrong with that.
Lauren: Right. Like he doesn't own the whole county. Well...
Emily: but then they're staying overnight in a nearby town and the Gardiners want to go and see the estate of Pemberley and several of the local people are telling them that, oh yeah, it's really beautiful. You'd like to see it. And then Lizzie kind of sneakily asks their chambermaids like, so the Darcy family, like they're not here right now. Are they? And is assured that no, no, no, they won't be there. It's fine. And so she agrees, they can go to Pemberley and that's fine.
Lauren: Yeah, she's stressed about it because she is thinking to herself, like I have no business at Pemberley. How am I supposed to go to this house?
Emily: What if I run into him?
Lauren: It's going to be so awkward, how am I going to explain myself?
Emily: The absolute mortification of like, okay, but what is that going to look like if you know, Darcy comes out of nowhere and was like, excuse me, why are you checking out this grand beautiful estate that you turned down ma'am.
Lauren: Exactly. Who are these people? Why are you here? What are you doing here?
Emily: And despite herself, she is, she's not able to contain those kinds of thoughts as they drive up to Pemberley and she sees really how gorgeous the whole surrounding land is, how beautiful the house is. And thinks to herself on several occasions, this could have been mine.
Lauren: Yeah. Like she catches herself, admiring it just for the sake of it, because the house fits in well with its surroundings, it's beautifully built. Like the nature of it all looks fantastic, you know, backs up to like these giant woods and there are trees everywhere and it's just this beautiful surrounding area and a beautiful house.
And she's admiring it just for the beauty of the architecture and the landscaping. And then remembers, 'Ooh, I could have been here already. I could have already been acquainted with this house. Like this could have been mine. I don't really know how [00:18:00] to think about that.'
Emily: Especially in comparison with the other grand house that she's been recently acquainted with, Rosings, which was very opulent and ostentatious, and she thinks to herself, "with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine with less of splendor and more real elegance than the furniture of Rosings." So it's like, oh shit, he's got taste.
Lauren: So like we've seen the more ostentatious, rich furnishings and Rosings from Lady Catherine. Although she's very far from being like new money. She's as old as old money can get, but still wants you to know that she has money. And according to the descriptions that we see of Rosings, doesn't necessarily have the taste to back up what she buys. She just buys things that are expensive. And then also wants you to know how expensive it is.
Emily: Have you seen the blog McMansion hell?
Lauren: Yes, I have.
Emily: Rosings makes me think of McMansion Hell, but like 200 years earlier, because like, okay, we're going to build all of this to show off exactly how much money we have and do things go together? It doesn't matter. We're rich. We can buy whatever we want and we're going to cram it all into this one house. But then Pemberley actually has like a sense of taste and decorum.
Lauren: Refinement.
Emily: Refinement. Exactly. Which yeah. Reading about all these things. I'm like, can I live at Pemberley? It sounds really nice. They've got like these beautiful high ceilings and every window looks out on a gorgeous view. And I also, it touched me the little mention of the room that the old Mr. Darcy had sort of preferred with all the portraits above the mantle, including Mr. Wickham's. And the housekeeper mentions that it's been kept just like that since his death.
And just that, [00:20:00] like, that little sentimentality of like Darcy is, you know, the master of the house now he could do whatever he wanted with this property. But in memory and in honor of his father he's, he's kept this one little thing the same, including the portrait of this man who has done such grievous wrong against the family, but he knows how much his father loved Wickham and didn't know of, of any other way to think about him.
Lauren: Right. It's a nice little tribute and also also shows Darcy's sentimental side. That like, he never really expresses, but we get to see flashes of through other people talking about their relationships with him and the housekeepers showing off this room in Pemberley that's been kept exactly the same, even though we don't get to see straight up Darcy being really sentimental as evidence of that emotion that he just doesn't really put on display.
Emily: Yeah. Being in his actual space and speaking to people who the housekeeper has apparently known him since he was four years old. And Lizzie's really getting a look at this other side of Darcy, the sentimental side, where he preserves this room that his father had loved so much, the indulgent brother who brings down a brand new piano for his sister and has an entire room made over because the last time she was at the house, she really liked being in that room.
The housekeeper's, just effusion about what a polite and kind and just person he is as a master of an estate, as a landlord, all of these things. And when they speak to people in town, the worst thing that is ever said about him is that he's kind of proud and Elizabeth kind of catches herself just like, well, that kind of makes sense in a small little market town where like, he doesn't spend time here.
People don't know him here and that was her first impression of him as well was the pride. So [00:22:00] she's just suddenly thrown into this entirely different perspective of who Darcy is as a person.
Lauren: You can see that she still tries to like soothe her own pride by trying to insert her own version of Darcy into these other people's versions of him that she's getting. So at, in one of the moments where she's admiring Pemberley and is having another moment in her feelings where she's thinking like, oh my goodness, I could have been mistress of this whole place. She tells herself, like, I could have been showing my aunt and uncle around as mistress of Pemberley, rather than walking around with them as a guest.
And then she tells herself, oh, actually, no, because they wouldn't have been allowed. And I would have been separated from them forever. And then that's how she makes herself feel better about it. But we'll see later that's not the case at all. They never would have been barred from Pemberley.
Emily: Let's talk about what happens later because the very thing that Elizabeth feared so dreadfully happens.
Lauren: Yep. So they're walking around the grounds and then who appears from behind the stables, but Mr. Darcy and it's too late to turn around and not be noticed by him.
Emily: And he and Elizabeth have this moment where they both just like freeze. Yeah. Just utter deer in headlights. Wait a minute. What are you doing here? You weren't supposed to be here. Panic.
Lauren: Yeah, neither of them-- they're blushing. None, neither of them really knows what to do. Darcy recovers himself quicker. And as course, as the master of the entire house comes over and like introduces himself, says, hello. Elizabeth is just like, do I compliment Pemberley? Does that make it weird? What can I say?
Emily: I mean really though, that's what's going through her head. Yeah. So they only spend a couple of minutes there and then he has to go off to attend to some business or whatever, but he comes out later as they're venturing further a field in the grounds and comes in, is very polite to Mr and Mrs. Gardiner and walks with them and invites [00:24:00] them inside for refreshments.
And is. Like totally contradictory to the way he had acted to people before and also contradicts Elizabeth's expectations about the way he would act towards her family. She's thinking to herself, even as she's about to make the introduction of Mr and Mrs. Gardiner as her aunt and uncle, she's thinking, oh, ha ha.
He, he thinks that they're fashionable people right now, but I'm about to reveal that they're actually related to me, but his demeanor doesn't change at all. He's still just perfectly affable and they're all invited back. You know, Mr. Gardiner is invited to come up and take advantage of the fishing and everything.
He sees them into their carriage, tells Elizabeth that he wants her to meet his sister.
Lauren: Which she also is like, can-- you do? I mean, I would love that, but you do?
Emily: Like, as someone with siblings and Lauren also is a person with siblings, like being like, oh yeah, I really want you to meet my sister. Like, that's, that's a thing.
Lauren: It is a thing. Like if I'm introducing you to my brother, that means that you're important to me because like there's, there is a very specific boundary where it's like, unless it's just like a happenstance, if you're not close to me in my life, you're not meeting my family. Cause my family's important to me.
And so they know if I'm introducing somebody to them, it's like, no, this person is like an important person in my life.
Emily: There are some tests that if you're even given the opportunity to take them, like that says something.
Lauren: And Elizabeth realizes the weight of that too, where she's like, okay. So not only does he not act like he despises me. He's not ignoring me. He's not being coldly polite, but he's being kind. And he asked if I wanted to meet Georgiana. Like, this is just completely the opposite of how she thought this interaction would go.
Emily: And this coupled [00:26:00] with just the general beauty of his home and the lovely things that people are saying about him the whole time.
I can imagine it's just throwing her for a loop. Like she's already started to reform her concept of who he is, but this, this is something else, right?
Lauren: Yeah. And, and she's really, she's struggling. And so she goes, you know, "she was overpowered by shame and vexation. Her coming there was the most unfortunate, most ill judged thing in the world. How strange it must appear to him and what a disgraceful light might it not strike so vain a man. It might seem as if she had purposely thrown himself in this way again, why did she come? Why did he come a day before he was expected?" She's just going on and on in her head about how terrible everything is.
Emily: But of course it turns out not so terrible. She is able to meet Georgiana and is just shocked when-- so she had learned from Darcy that Georgiana and the Bingley siblings as well, were going to be coming down to Pemberley the next day. And so she thinks, okay, we'll give it a day. Georgiana will want to settle back in at home. And then. You know, day after tomorrow, I'll probably meet her.
But no, the same day that Georgiana arrives at Pemberley, she and Darcy come into town to see Elizabeth. So does Bingley, which is really cute, but he just, like, he shows up 15 minutes late with Starbucks, you know?
Lauren: And I think it even says like Elizabeth recognized, like his bounding step or something like that, like here comes the golden retriever. He's back.
Emily: Truly he is. But she can see right away that Georgiana is just like, she is painfully shy. And I think later it says something about she can see how people would assume that Georgiana was just horrifically prideful, and vain, but really is, is just that shy. [00:28:00] And so is able to kind of have sympathy, which I totally get, because I do this with people too, where I'm like, oh, oh, I see what's going on with you.
I'm going to make a little extra effort because. I know that you want to do this, but it's just too hard. Cause I've been there.
Lauren: Right? I mean, I feel like that's one of the most relatable things. Cause I think both of us have been tagged as like the aloof person, because we're just quiet and shy. Moreso when we were like 18, than now.
Emily: Oh, me more so than you.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was, I've told you before, that was my first impression of you. I was like, this person is smarter than I am. She probably thinks that she's way too cool. But it was just that you were shy and you didn't know who I was.
Emily: Yeah. I've had multiple people that I've became friends with later were like, oh yeah, I thought you were just like way too cool. Or, like you were really stuck up or something or thought you were way smarter than everybody else. Like, no, I just didn't talk. I would have loved to have more friends. I would have loved to say things in class, but yeah.
Lauren: That was both of us as teenagers, I think. Cause I definitely have gotten that feedback before as well where it's like, I thought you were going to be so mean, but you're actually really nice.
Like thank... you? So I relate to Georgiana. It's like, no, I'm not stuck up. I just don't know what to say to you.
Emily: And like, Lauren and I have had this conversation before, where I'm like, I know I can be pretentious about some things.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: But those are very specific things. Like in general, I feel like, and I hope that I'm not just a pretentious person. Lauren's nodding.
Lauren: Because there's a difference. Yeah. There's like there's being pretentious about certain things and there's being a pretentious person and we can both be pretentious about certain things, but we're not pretentious as a personality trait. At least I hope not.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, we may just be in a horrible feedback loop here where like you're not pretentious, but I guess, you know, y'all as our listeners can tell us if, on this potentially very pretentious podcasts, we come off as pretentious, which my historical research may not [00:30:00] be doing me any favors on that front today, but we'll get to that.
Lauren: Oh, okay. Now I'm intrigued.
Emily: But anyway Elizabeth is able to see Georgiana's sort of painful shyness in a slightly different context as well when she and Mrs. Gardiner return the visit and go to Pemberley where Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst are sitting with Georgiana when they arrive.
Lauren: Mm. And of course, you know, Caroline always has something to say. And so she makes a comment to Lizzie about like, oh, your family must have been so disappointed when the regiment left. Like, aren't you so sad that now your flirty sisters will have nothing to do. Just a very pointed thing where it's in the veil of politeness, but anybody who can read between the lines can see that she's being her usual petty ass bitch self.
Emily: Oh my God. She's so petty. And of course she says this while Darcy is in the room. And so Elizabeth and Darcy and Georgiana, all three of them are very much like, did she just do that? But Caroline doesn't even have the full context of the implications of mentioning Wickham. So like she knows that there's something with Wickham, but knows that there's enough that she doesn't want to fully bring it up in front of Darcy.
And Darcy kind of gives the Lizzie like the sort of panicked look, but she just brushes it off gracefully and moves on with her conversation to Georgiana. Which again, like, yeah. Getting along with the sibling who has trouble with other people, that's, that's a mark.
Lauren: You know, it's one of those things where it's just like, if I weren't already attracted to you, this just bumped you up in my estimation. It says as well that like, if Caroline had known how much pain she would have caused Darcy, by bringing up something related to Wickham, she wouldn't have said anything, but she's trying to throw Elizabeth off and in doing so doesn't realize that she's making [00:32:00] both Darcy and Georgiana really uncomfortable.
Emily: And entirely contrary to her intended effect, it just makes Darcy appreciate Lizzie more for just not rising to the bait.
Lauren: Which is like every interaction that Caroline has throughout this book.
Emily: All backfires on her. She's trying so hard to be like Darcy, look how much better I am than Lizzie. And he's just like, Lizzie. Like, oh my God. After Lizzie and the Gardiners leave, she's making all of these petty comments about, wow, I can't believe anybody ever thought Lizzie was a beauty. Do you remember that? Darcy has to admit like, yeah, at first I agreed with you that like, she wasn't that pretty. " But that was only when I first knew her for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance," and that shuts Caroline up real quick.
Lauren: I wish y'all could see that I just snapped in a Z formation. Like it's the nineties on the playground.
Emily: But whew, so much has happened just internally, emotionally in these few chapters where Elizabeth is, she was making this slow, quiet progress on reforming her ideas of Darcy. As far as we can tell with no anticipation of ever seeing him again, and then suddenly.
They're thrown into proximity. They're thrown into company, she's meeting his sister. His house is beautiful. This is like very quick u-turn here. She, she had been starting to ease into the turn lane. Now she's like, I'm zooming the other direction.
Lauren: Yeah. And has that thing in the back of her mind, like he's still in love with me, right? That can't possibly be...
Emily: whereas Mrs. Gardiner's like, oh, he's so in love with her.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: I loved all the little commentary from the Gardiners who were just like sharing these looks, which you can just see in your mind's eye. They're just looking at each other. Like they like each other. He's in love. She [00:34:00] likes him.
They can see where, where this is heading.
Lauren: It clicked immediately for them.
Emily: Oh yeah.
Lauren: They did not miss a thing.
Emily: I wish I could hear the pillow talk about that.
Lauren: Oh my gosh.
Truth in Pride and Prejudice
Emily: Can you imagine? But actually that makes a pretty good transition into focusing on our thematic discussion of truth, which I wanted to start by throwing it all the way back to the very first line of the book.
Lauren: Ooh.
Emily: That it is a truth universally acknowledged...
Lauren: yes.
Emily: That a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. Is it a truth universally acknowledged? Like, I know this is the shallowest possible thing to start on it, but you know, you've got to start somewhere. It's just not, it's just not, that's just, you have to be in such an impossibly specific context for that to be a truth acknowledged at all, much less universally. Like that line, always with, you know, thanks, of course, also to the Lizzie Bennet Diaries that I can only ever hear coming from Mrs. Bennet.
Lauren: Yeah. Okay. So 1. I think it's supposed to be sarcastic.
Emily: Oh, absolutely.
Lauren: 2. I'm sitting here laughing because adding to the 'perhaps I am more pretentious than I would like to believe that I am,' when I took my seminar on Jane Austen, I wrote my paper on perception and truth in Jane Austen.
Emily: Oh my God. We're so prepared for this episode. All right, everyone just pause and give Lauren a round of applause because she's been sick all this week, but still she's, she's coming back with a vengeance. She's going to hit it.
Lauren: I appreciate it.
Emily: You're just prepared for this episode, like seven years ago.
Lauren: Yep. Pretty much. Yeah. But basically like my thesis of that paper, I was talking about like Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice and how Jane Austen worked with like perception and truth in both of [00:36:00] those and was how she uses the events and the characters and the narration of both of those books to teach her readers basically to think for themselves and to be able to rationalize... reason their way towards truth, rather than just accepting truth at face value or accepting the words of other people. But not even 100% believing the narration of her own books sometimes, like read between the lines, look at what's being presented to you, and figure out on your own what the truth is pretty much.
And I think we see so much of that in this section, specifically of like the different truths that are happening parallel to one another, depending on like, which person you're speaking to, like, you know, Mr. Bennet has his own version of truth about what's true about his family. Like he thinks it's true that no one's going to care about what Mary and Kitty and Lydia are doing with regards to Jane and Elizabeth, whereas Elizabeth has her own version of truth, which is no, they will ruin us all.
There's five different accounts of Mr. Darcy that Elizabeth has to contend with at any given time, all of which are true to the people speaking them. And she has to figure out which version of Darcy she's going to accept as the real one.
Like what's her truth.
Emily: Yeah. From our perspective people today, we, we want to think of truth as being totally equivalent to the idea of fact, we want truth to be objective. We want there to be one inalienable truth that can't be affected by perceptions, by biases, by other judgments, but that's not, that's not really what it is.
We've seen... given a very charitable interpretation of Wickham and his motives that there can be multiple quote unquote true accounts of the same factual events. So [00:38:00] it's possible that Wickham truly believes that Darcy just has it out for him. Whereas Darcy thinks that he was actually being pretty generous in giving Wickham what he did.
Of course, like I said, that's very charitable towards the Wickham. I don't, I don't know how we feel about that. Perhaps too charitable.
Lauren: I think he can still be manipulative and still think that Darcy truly wronged him in his, in his brain. He can think that Darcy really did him wrong and that's true to him. And he can also have been a complete asshole in trying to avenge that perceived wrong.
Historical Context: The Philosophy of Truth
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. So even given a basic set of facts, they can look different in truth, based on the perspective of the people who experienced them. So this is. This is where my pretension comes in, because where I, I decided to kind of start my dive in for the historical research at this time was with the whole kind of philosophical basis of neoclassicism.
Lauren: Can you define that?
Emily: Yeah. So. Beginning like late 17th, early 18th century. In what's referred to was the long 18th century because of a general philosophical consensus was sort of enlightenment. The idea of the classics of Greek and Roman civilization, especially, came to the forefront as being desirable.
And these are the kind of things artistically, philosophically that we want to aspire to. So we have neoclassical architecture. That's why, you know, all the, the Georgian construction is all like, wait, that looks like Greek knockoffs because it is Greek knockoffs. But they were also, like I said, philosophically going back to a [00:40:00] lot of the work of ancient Greeks and Romans.
And so one of those that, that kind of sprung out from the little bit of research I did. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a neoclassicist or whatever. I don't specialize in this. This is, you know, two hours on the internet.
Lauren: We are literally experts in nothing, just as a general disclaimer, once again, we figure all this out with like within minutes of recording these episodes.
Emily: Hours!
Lauren: Hours, hours for Emily, minutes for me.
Emily: I have to go to Wikipedia. So I do at least read multiple pages. But one of, one of the references that sprang out was that of Democritus who was an ancient Greek philosopher. And one of his sort of best known or maybe best preserved kind of aphorisms was, "in reality, we know nothing for the truth is in an abyss," which also made me think of the concept of Plato's cave, where, I mean, that's, that's kind of thought experiment, that's kind of getting at a different thing, where humans are metaphorically in a cave and all that we're seeing is the shadows that true things cast on a wall. So we're, we're just seeing sort of the, the reflections, the shadows of things, rather than their actual forms. This is also very complex stuff that, you know, people spend their entire careers on, but still.
Lauren: We're going to just simplify it real quick for you in about the next five minutes.
Has there been decades of research done on this? Absolutely. We have all the answers for you right here. Right now, you heard it here first.
Emily: I spent an hour Googling, so that's good enough. No, but I am, it's such an ancient idea that had been kind of brought back into public consciousness in the decades before Jane Austen was writing that truth is [00:42:00] subjective. The actual truth we can never get at directly. And then just for our requisite meme content, one translation of that Democritus quote is, "of truth we know nothing for truth is in a well," which is what inspired the classic late 19th century painting by John Leon playroom, " truth coming out of her well to chastise mankind."
Lauren: That's a meme? But what are you talking about memes?
Emily: That the painting is a meme, "truth coming out of her well to shame mankind," the naked woman climbing out of a stone well, waving a broom and looking angry?
Lauren: I'm glad you gave me that visualization because based off the title, I had no idea what you were talking about.
Emily: I'll put a link to it in our notes.
Lauren: Beautiful.
Emily: But yeah, the, the idea that that humans cannot directly access truth is something that was kind of going around in philosophical circles at the time. So even though Jane Austen is coming from very much a Christian perspective, we've talked before about how she was a pretty devout Anglican and a Christian believer-- Lauren's mouthing "I'm a believer".
So even though she was operating personally from a bit of a different tradition, that was still the sort of thing that in an intellectual context would have been recognized at the time. Which again is something that, that we're accessing here is what is the truth?
Lauren: Every time I hear that. All I can hear is Oprah saying that. That's all like, and that's like the, the GIF that I see in my head is like, so what is the truth? Just with her pensive look, like hand on chin. It's so perfect. Also the person who does the music for this podcast, she has met Oprah. Do you know that?
Emily: I don't think I, I knew that, but I'm not surprised.
Anyway, that that idea that every person is going to have their own interpretation. And this question [00:44:00] of, are we believing Wickham? Are we believing Darcy? Brought me to wondering, and this is something that I don't have an answer for, but we can discuss if you're so inclined, is the difference or the relationship between truth and honesty.
Lauren: Ooh. Okay. Do you have thoughts already on truth versus honesty?
Emily: Not well-formed.
Lauren: Okay.
Emily: And I'm, I'm not trying to like go for a definition here or anything like that, but how do they interact?
Lauren: I think honesty is speaking your truth. And it might not necessarily be the truth because again, what is the truth? That's what set us down a whole tangent to begin with.
Emily: The truth is in an abyss.
Lauren: Yeah. You know, the truth is in a hole. We can't get to it. So I think. Honesty is speaking what you believe to be the truth.
Emily: Yeah. I, I agree with that because I think as we try to access truth, that honesty is an important step in that because you have to recognize and share your truth to be honest. I think honesty is the action.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Whereas truth is the object.
Lauren: That makes sense to me.
Emily: Okay. I'm not entirely sure that it makes sense to me. So I'm glad it's comprehensible on some level.
Lauren: I'm trying to think of a way to articulate my thoughts, but I think I've been as about intelligent as I can be on this subject.
Emily: Fair enough. I mean, it's a deep one. Like I said, people have built entire careers on this one topic, so.
Lauren: It's a fun one to discuss though. I feel like--
Emily: when you're pretentious like us.
Lauren: I was literally about to say, we're really not doing much for the non- pretentious argument right now, but I'm having a great time. So.
Emily: I mean, one of the points of this podcast was to bring not just Austen, but also a lot of these lofty ideas that get kicked around [00:46:00] down to a level that people feel more comfortable engaging with because there are people who build their entire careers out of debating "what is truth" and referencing Democritus and shit like that.
But like, this is something that, that people can access these kinds of philosophical debates. They don't have to just happen in the ivory tower.
Lauren: We are not here for the ivory tower. Burn it down.
Emily: Everybody can talk about these things.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: Burn down the gates.
Lauren: Exactly.
Pop Culture Connection: We’re All In The Matrix
Emily: No gates to keep. Anyway, if we're brain mush, if we're done being intellectual, do we want to just officially leave that realm and hop down into pop culture?
Lauren: We can, though this is also probably going to be a little bit more intellectual.
Emily: No, we're just being smart in this episode, damn.
Lauren: I know, which is like not good for my brain, which has been through the ringer this week, but, you know what. So I read with the wrong theme in mind for this week, which means that I also just came up with this pop culture connection about 15 minutes ago, but I still think it's a good one.
I have faith. Since we've been talking about truth and how you define truth, or how do you find. I was thinking about. So there is a new Matrix movie that is coming out. And when we're talking about philosophical things that are made for pop culture and like made for everybody to be able to dissect and digest, I feel like that's one of the best metaphors for truth as, as well as with like everything else out there that you can find, pretty much.
And this is where I feel like we can get a really interesting comparison between truth and pop culture and in The Matrix and then truth in jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice because The Matrix in the first movie tells you, like, you cannot trust your own mind. You can't trust what you see, because everything is being created around you.
You know, you have the choice, you take the blue pill or do you take the red pill? Like, do you want to wake up and be able to really see, and see the real truth that's being hidden from you? Or do you want to stay in the comfortable lie? [00:48:00] Whereas with Pride and Prejudice or with the point of any Jane Austen book is specifically to rely on your own mind to determine what truth is and to, you know, take things at face value and not to rely on your own maybe misconceptions or prejudices or anything like that when you're talking about relying on your own mind for truth, but like using your brain to think through everything and look at the evidence that's been presented to you and figure out what the truth is.
But I think it's really trippy to think about what happens when you don't trust what your mind is telling to you. So if all you have is your mind to think about truth, what happens when you're in a situation like The Matrix where you can't trust what your mind is telling you, then how do you figure out what the truth is?
Emily: I've never seen The Matrix.
Lauren: Oh, I didn't realize that! Oh, okay. So basic premise --
Emily: It's in my cultural consciousness, but I've never seen the matrix.
Lauren: Okay. Got it. So for anybody else who may also have not seen the matrix--
Emily: you're not alone.
Lauren: You are not alone. The basic premise is-- and this is a slight spoiler, but not really-- computers have taken over. You know, humans may have girl bossed a bit too close to the sun and made the computers a little bit too intelligent.
And so now the computers are running everything. And so they're using humans as pretty much like their power source. And so humans have been plugged in to the matrix. And so in the human's minds, they're living in like normal nineties world, you know, they're going to work, they're doing all these things, but in reality, they were just in this pod because they're being used for power sources by computers.
Emily: Okay. Man, if I were offered the choice between like, continue being blissfully ignorant and living your life, or like understand the dystopian levels of horror that surround you I'd be like, no. Bliss.
Lauren: Blissful ignorance please.
Emily: Please. I will, I will continue in the simulation. That's okay.
Lauren: I do not wish to understand.
Emily: It's not perfect, but I have enough anxiety.
[00:50:00] Thank you.
Lauren: Yeah, no, I'm good. This reality is kind of already a hellscape. I don't want to see how it can get worse.
Emily: That's bad enough. I don't want to see the other options.
Lauren: No, I'm good. Anyway, this has been our accidental mind melding episode. We're living in a simulation. How do you determine what's true. The world may never know. I hope you can sleep tonight. Thank you for joining us on Reclaiming Jane.
Emily: Okay. On the, the sort of co-opted topic of this whole red pill thing, you mentioned before, the idea of the effect of biases and how the point from Jane Austen is not, you can only rely on yourself. Right? But rather to actually reason through things, the co-opted quote, red pill movement, which I say with the utmost derision.
Has totally misunderstood. I'm not saying they're reading Jane Austen and getting this interpretation out of it, but misunderstanding this idea of being encouraged to develop their own critical thinking. And instead deciding that whatever biases they have internalized, that's the only right way to interpret things, right?
So they're, they're taking the shallow incorrect interpretation of Jane Austen rather than seeing what she really meant.
Lauren: "This is how I see it, so it's true."
Emily: Exactly. Because only my interpretation is the truth.
Lauren: When really the whole message of this book, which Elizabeth is having to learn, is that your interpretation or your perception is not necessarily the truth. So that has been my pop culture connection for today.
Emily: Excellent.
Lauren: I hope it was trippy enough. It was not intentional.
Emily: No, it was great. That was great. I mean, there's, there's so many ways that I think we could go with the idea of truth in pop culture and not even touching on like, you know, the spicy topics, but even stuff like reality shows.
Lauren: Did you ever watch [00:52:00] that show Unreal.
Emily: No.
Lauren: I think it was created by somebody who used to work on The Bachelor, but it's like a fictionalized look at what happens behind the scenes on like a Bachelor-esque TV show from the production standpoint of all the different--
Emily: that is such a fascinating concept.
Lauren: The first episode, it kind of sets the tone for the full show where we see this producer just kind of like dropping a little nudge at this contestant and then a little hint over here, and then suggesting this person have an extra glass of champagne and then just watching the fireworks happen later, all because she's just poked here and then twisted here and then nudge this person a little bit to make sure that she gets the explosive reaction that she wants as soon as they get on camera and voila, you have a "reality."
Emily: Well, I really enjoyed that pop culture connection. I think this has been a very trippy episode. I hope it throws somebody off.
Lauren: I hope it made sense. I feel like we just went in 10 different directions.
Emily: Let us know if this sent you into an existential spiral!
Lauren: And join us on this other plane of existence.
Wrapping Up & Final Thoughts
Emily: Shall we wrap up with final thoughts?
Lauren: I think we shall. Is it your turn to go first?
Emily: Cause you recapped. I feel like I have the same takeaway as I do every single time with Pride and Prejudice that you can't trust first impressions, but also more in line with this episode's theme is that you can't always trust your own direct experience. Because your truth is still affected by your own perspectives, your own biases. And so even when you're honest about something, someone else may have seen it in a completely different light.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: And I think that's all I got.
Lauren: I like it.
Emily: I'm glad. What's your final takeaway?
Lauren: Nothing is real. There is no truth.
Emily: All [00:54:00] right.
Lauren: No, I think honestly, not that nothing is real, but that there is not necessarily always an objective truth, I think is my final takeaway.
Emily: I think that follows logically from what we've been talking about.
Lauren: I'm preventing myself from rambling. Cause I will talk for another two minutes ad nauseum. And so I'm just gonna cut it off.
Emily: All right. Sounds like a plan, Sam.
Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll look at chapters 46 through 50 of Pride and Prejudice through the lens of sacrifice.
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, who has famously met Oprah, and our show art is by Emily Davis Hale, who has not.
Lauren: We'll see you next time.
Emily: Oh, that was, that was the greatest tragedy of my elementary school life was that I can't snap. I never could snap in a Z formation. And it's just not the same to clap.
Lauren: No, it's really not. You can't clap in a Z formation. Have it look cool.
Emily: Just, you know, that ultimately that was my downfall. That was the reason why I was never cool.
It wasn't any of the other things about me. It was the fact that I couldn't snap.
Lauren: I mean, look that snapping in a Z formation and like 1999 was like the thing to end all arguments. There was no come back from that.
Emily: The ultimate shutdown.
Lauren: It was, if somebody did that in your face, you just had to take the L and go sit down, like, get out of the sandbox.
Emily: Yeah, of course. I was never even cool enough to warrant having a Z formation, snap aimed at me, but you know, I witnessed it and it was brutal.
Lauren: Yeah, truly.
Emily: I've [00:56:00] witnessed it from the picnic table where I was sitting and reading my book because that's what I did.