Sense and Sensibility 1-5: “Stans and Sensibility”
The premiere episode is here! In this episode, Emily and Lauren discuss the first five chapters of Sense and Sensibility with a focus on power. Also included: the historical context of Jane Austen’s first published novel, discussing how 2020 stan culture can be linked to 18th-century sensibility, and a generous amount of dislike for Fanny Dashwood.
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Show Notes
Happy 245th birthday, Jane Austen!
Who knew that recording the first episode of a podcast could make you so nervous, even though you’re the only two people in the room and that room is your living room? The sigh of relief we let out when we hit “end recording” was probably loud enough to be heard across the street. As was Lauren’s refrigerator, which tried its hardest to make it into the final cut.
This is our first foray into podcasting and it has been such a fun learning experience so far. We can’t wait to see where this takes us.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Learn more about the sensibility movement
One Direction fans hacked into an airport security camera (no, really)
The Louis Tomlinson lollipop tweet (AKA proof this was not just a fever dream)
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Episode 1
Sense and Sensibility Ch. 1-5 | “Stans and Sensibility”
Introductions
[00:00:00] Lauren: This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.
Emily: I'm Emily Davis-Hale
Lauren: and I'm Lauren Wethers,
Emily: and today, we're reading chapters 1-5 of Sense and Sensibility, looking at it through the lens of power.
Welcome to our very first episode of Reclaiming Jane. We're thrilled to be here. We hope you're excited, too.
Lauren: It is incredible to us that people would even want to listen to this podcast other than us. So we're really excited that --
Emily: much less express excitement about it --
Lauren: exactly. So we're really happy to be officially premiering this new podcast.
Emily: So to expand a little bit on what we said in our trailer, this is a podcast to look at all of the things that don't get talked about in your typical Jane [00:01:00] Austen fan circles. So we want to look at basically all the different aspects of identity and society. Anything we're feeling like talking about, anything you guys want to hear about.
Lauren: We want this to be something that's collaborative. So we have things that we definitely want to talk about, but as we continue to grow our listenership and as we continue to build this as a community, we want to hear from the listeners as well for what they would like to hear and what they'd like to hear us discuss.
I, we, for one have both had experience with feeling as though there's not a place for us in fandom, especially in period piece fandom or Regency fandom. And so, we're really excited to be able to create a space, however small, for other people who might've felt the same way as us.
Emily: And we each have different areas of sort of interest and expertise, which we're each bringing to this.
So I have more of an interest in just straight up history and especially social history, being a linguistic anthropologist, that definitely feeds into my extracurricular activities.
[00:02:00] Lauren: Nerd!
Emily: Look who's talking!
Lauren: Um, so the other nerd on this podcast is somebody who has two degrees in English literature because one wasn't enough.
I have an undergraduate degree in English and Spanish literature and then got a master's degree in English. And I'm also very excited to eventually talk about film adaptations because like the overachiever that I was and am, I also got a minor in film studies. So just talking about all of pop culture, really pretentious...
...in pretentious ways is basically what I got degrees in. So I'm very excited to talk about this.
Emily: And then outside of school, you just yell about pop culture in non-pretentious ways.
Lauren: Yes. I, I yell a lot on Twitter.
Emily: For a very special treat, I went through our text history today and I found — if I can find my phone — I found the text that started it all!
Lauren: Was this the one that started with, “Okay. Hear me out,” ‘cause I feel like a lot of my texts start like that.
Emily: They do.
Lauren: Oh God.
Emily: So August [00:03:00] 2nd from Lauren. "Okay, so. Hear me out. We should start a Jane Austen podcast.”
“Go on.”
“Imagine a podcast where we have historical knowledge and social justice and deep pop culture knowledge, all applied to Jane Austen. It would be — all caps — AWESOME."
I'm so glad that we're making it happen. This has been a labor of love for the last few months.
Lauren: This is certainly one of the bright spots in the hellscape that has been 2020 for me.
And by the time this episode premieres, we will be only two weeks away from ending 2020, which I will be even more excited about.
30-Second Recaps
Emily: Yes.
All right. Now that we've got, you know, a little more introduction to the podcast. Let's jump into the first of what will be a regular segment, our 30 second recaps.
Lauren: Oh God.
Okay.
Emily: All right. So the concept of the 30 second recap is pretty straightforward. Each of us will have [00:04:00] 30 seconds on the clock to go over what happened in the segment that we're talking about today. Chapters one through five of Sense and Sensibility. I'm going to pull out a timer. Lauren, would you like to go first?
Lauren: Yes. I think.
Emily: Don't sound so uncertain. I can go first if you want me to.
Lauren: I would like to go first.
Emily: Okay.
Are you ready?
Lauren: Yes.
Emily: Go.
Lauren: Okay. So chapters one through five, Sense and Sensibility, we're introduced to the Dashwoods, who are three sisters, Elinor, Marianne, and the other one. And then their mother, who are living in a fantastic place that they love, except for when their father dies. They're going to have to move because Regency England, and they have an older brother from a different marriage. Um, who was married to — oh my God, did it go by that fast? He's married to somebody awful, they have to move and then they have to go to somewhere else and it sucks bye!
Emily: Ding, ding, ding.
Wow.
All right.
Lauren: Oh that [00:05:00] was terrible. That's going to get better. I promise. Okay. Emily, are you ready?
Emily: No, but I'll do it anyway.
Lauren: Please do better than me because otherwise people won't know what's happening in these five chapters. All right. On your marks. Get set. Go.
Emily: All right. So two old white men die in rapid succession, leaving their estate and fortune to the oldest son of this family, who doesn't want to help out his younger half sisters and his stepmother.
So they all end up high class poor, and are forced to move. Forced to move into a cottage that another distant family member has offered them.
Lauren: Impressive.
Emily: Thank you.
Lauren: That was much better than mine.
Emily: That's what I was thinking of in bed last night was, "Okay. Old white men die. They leave their fortune."
Lauren: I mean, that's pretty much the gist of it.
Emily: It is.
That's why it was [00:06:00] my recap.
Lauren: Yep.
Historical Context
Emily: All right. So let's talk a little bit about the historical context of what's going on here. So, Sense and Sensibility, which I have to very carefully enunciate every time I say it, so difficult. It was published in 1811, but is believed to have been written between 1795 to 97, when Jane Austen was late teens, early twenties.
Basically, I thought it was really interesting, looking at some of the ways that it had been interpreted — the book had been interpreted when it was first published. So early reviews tended to characterize it as being sort of a moral lesson, favoring Elinor’s, the eldest daughter's, more stable temperament over her sister Marianne's flightier tendencies towards [00:07:00] romanticizing.
It was also very notably contrasted with what was popular in the contemporary period, which is epistolary fiction. For those of you who might not be familiar with the genre, epistolary fiction is a story told through letters, basically. But essentially what the whole premise boils down to is the priority of men and their positions in families. And that's pretty clearly illustrated here.
In general, the mid 1790s, all the way up through that first decade of the 1800s, it was really a very rapidly changing world, kind of like what we've seen in the last few decades. There were multiple revolutions, the impacts of the American revolution were certainly being felt strongly, the French revolution, the [00:08:00] Haitian revolution, quite a few other rebel movements in various areas in the world. There was a boom in colonialism, especially by England. They were making inroads into India, and basically just, you know, taking what they could get wherever they could.
But there --
Lauren: Take what you get, give nothing back?
Sorry. Pop culture references are hard to turn off.
Emily: That's why we're doing this.
But in addition to colonialism, in the western world, there was a tendency toward industry that was just getting its start. The cotton gin had been patented in the 1790s, so that was mechanizing the production of cotton products.
Medicine was advancing as new discoveries were made. And then, of course [00:09:00] there were famous movements in philosophy and in art as well as a huge variety of movements in favor of abolition. So there's a lot going on in the world, but the basic foundation of this upper-class English society was still very much revolving around landowning men and the money they had or did not have.
And so they absolutely wielded the power in this particular context. But we get to look at some ways that maybe their power wasn't absolute, or at least there were influences on their power that they might or might not have been completely aware of.
Lauren: That sounds like an excellent segue into talking about the chapters themselves.
Emily: Yes, let's do it.
Power in Sense and Sensibility 1-5
Lauren: So if we can, let's talk about Fanny and how much I hate her.
[00:10:00] Emily: For the record. When I finished reading that chapter, I sent Lauren a text that just said, "Fanny is a heinous bitch."
Lauren: I was about to go back into our text thread and see exactly what it was that you sent. But I'm glad that you know that from memory.
Emily: Because I have not stopped thinking about it since that moment.
Lauren: I mean, she's truly awful.
Emily: She is.
Yeah. So ostensibly John Dashwood here, the eldest and only son of the late Mr. Dashwood, has inherited Norland Estate. He's inherited all the fortune except for what had been practically settled upon his younger sisters.
Lauren: Yeah. And Fanny is — how would we like to describe her other than heinous bitch?
She is smart enough to understand how to wield the very little power that she does have. The entirety of one of the chapters in this very opening early [00:11:00] section of Sense and Sensibility is literally just a conversation between Fanny and John over how much support financially they're going to give his sisters — not necessarily his stepmother, but his half sisters.
He progressively goes from saying, “Well, we'll give them 3000 pounds each” to, “Well, we can help them out maybe every now and again, we'll give them the furniture that's owed to them in the will and we'll help them find a place to live, maybe.” And that's about it. Because Fanny just keeps working away at him and working away to make sure that most of the money is cut for them and for their son, rather than being given to these people who she clearly has no feelings for.
And even though she doesn't actually have any power to make this decision, she is the one making the decisions in this relationship. And he has no idea that he's being manipulated behind the scenes, probably far more than what we see in just this one chapter.
Emily: And there's a lot of, in this conversation, very explicit appeals to what I noted down [00:12:00] as being the luxury of placing one's own concerns above all else, as well as the privilege of... thinking of yourself as having something taken away from you rather than framing it as just a generous act or something that you ought to do as a good person.
Lauren: Exactly. And one of the notes that I had written down as well is that she's acting in her own self-interest, but she's also taking power away from other women in doing so, because if they had had that extra financial support, they would have had more power just in general, power to choose where they like to live, more power in securing a match for themselves because finances were such a big part of that, especially back then. And she's knowingly taking that away from them and does not care at all.
Emily: Yeah. This is a period and an area where the dowry is relevant. So the dowry would be the money, the assets, any resources that a wife brings to a marriage. In other times, and other [00:13:00] places, there would be the reverse of that, the bride price, in which the husband's family would provide assets to the wife's family. But that is definitely not the case here. To make oneself an attractive match in the Regency world, you needed to be bringing something to the table. If you were a lady, they weren't just going to take ya in.
Lauren: And this is also where overt versus more subversive forms and expressions of power. And one of the things that gets me when I'm reading period piece fiction, or really any type of historical work, is when we're talking about who has power and who doesn't, who's not on the page who also doesn't have power. That's one of the things that I struggle with when I read things like this is thinking about, “Oh, well, where would I be if I were to put myself in this situation,” and the answer is almost always either nonexistent or not even close to the social realm of these characters.
So they want — [00:14:00] They have relative power. Relative to the people in their social circle, you know, they've been knocked down a few pegs. They don't have as much power, and relative to men, especially, they really don't have any power at all, but relative to the people who they employ as maids or servants, or relative to the people who were in the British empire as slaves, they have a lot more power.
And that's one of the things that I always think about as a person of color who's reading these things is I can imagine sometimes it's difficult to empathize with these characters. If you're reading this as somebody who's Black or Brown, where they're talking about, how, woe is me, my life is awful, thinking about, okay, well, where, would I have been in 1811 or 1790, or what have you? Probably worse off.
One of the other things that stood out to me was in chapter four, we're looking at the potential match between Elinor and Edward as well, and who has the power to declare their feelings for who and make their intentions known and who can really move that forward because Elinor has no power or [00:15:00] way whatsoever to really declare her feelings for Edward in a way that's socially acceptable.
And she has too much sense to be able to break societal convention. Marianne, on the other hand, who has more of the sensibility side of things would just say, you know, throw yourself at his feet and declare your love and your passion. She's very much like the “romance novel times a thousand” end of things. Whereas Elinor is a little bit more conventional and understands where her power lies and also understands when she can and cannot use it.
And this is one of the instances where she can't.
Defining Sense and Sensibility
Emily: So now that you brought up those terms that we find in the title, the sense and the sensibility, would you expand a little bit on what those mean?
Lauren: I would love to! Another thing about being an English major is that I took a whole seminar on Austen back in undergrad. So I still have some of my notes from class, but I also have my beautiful academic edition of Sense and Sensibility that has work that other scholars did — not me — to define these terms. I'm really just [00:16:00] quoting what's in this book and doing none of the actual work.
But sensibility itself was kind of a social movement at the time that this was published and written. There was more of a movement that was trying to improve both male and female manners. It was both a liability and a virtue to be sensible. And we define “sensible” in a different way in 2020 than they did in that time. So sensibility was closer to “sentimental” today. If you think about somebody who's really sentimental, that's really what sensibility was in Jane Austen's time.
Emily: I've always understood sensibility as being, like, a very practical person.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: Which is kind of the opposite of what it is here.
Lauren: It is the exact opposite. And I think if you don't know that cultural context, it can be really confusing when they're talking about sensibility in the book, because Marianne isn't maybe our definition of sensible, but she is the Regency era definition of sensible because it was this whole cultural movement about talking about what male manners should be and what [00:17:00] female manners should be and all this stuff. So sense was more male and was connected to genius and learning, and was more like how we would define sense in 2020, and then sensibility was considered more female and it was more modesty, truth and emotion.
So it was considered a virtue to be connected with your emotions and to feel really deeply. And so when you see Marianne kind of, like, acting as though it's the end of the world over the smallest thing, because she feels so deeply, that was considered a virtue, but. On the flip side, because it was also considered female, too much of it wasn't considered great either because we can't have anything.
So sensibility was kind of considered a virtue, but also if you had too much of it and you kind of flip the dial, not flip the dial, but turn the dial too much to the left, we'll say, then it was now considered something that was, Oh, you know, silly women that can't really control their emotions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Emily: That's so fascinating to me that, I mean, also I'm a linguist, so I'm sitting here going, “Yes! Words, changing meanings! I love it!”
[00:18:00] But I'm so glad to have that context now because I — like a lot of people — went into this thinking, Oh, what's the difference, sense and sensibility.
Lauren: Exactly. And one thing too, is I noticed in the title, it's not sense or sensibility, it's sense and sensibility. So I think even in the title, Austen's kind of implying that you need both, you need a balance and you see that with Elinor and Marianne as well. And I think we'll see that play out throughout the book. It's not choosing between the two, it's figuring out what that balance is.
Power in Sense and Sensibility Part 2
One other thing that I thought was really interesting was that most women authors wrote prefaces that were kind of apologizing for publishing and being immodest and kind of stepping out of their, their sphere as women, because, you know, women were meant to be confined to the home and doing anything in the public sphere was meant for men, including publishing, even though nobody had to see your face. Um, Austen refused, because that was not how she rolled.
And if she also got [00:19:00] letters from rude publishers, she would sign it as Mrs. Ashton Dennis. Initials, M.A.D. So.
Emily: We stan an icon.
Lauren: WE. STAN.
Yeah. So it's no surprise that Jane Austen wrote somebody like Lizzie Bennet, because she had no time for the bullshit.
Emily: I love it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: That's great.
Lauren: I think the last thing I want to say about where the theme shows up in the section that we read is you can see how power is evident even like the opening sentence of the chapter, or the book even.
So the very first sentence is, "The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex." And for a family to have been long settled somewhere, that implies that you have money to have been settled in one place for however long a time, whether for generations or for a few decades, what have you, it means you have enough money to sit there and to be still.
And then that's just reinforced by the second one where it says, "their estate was large and the residence was at Norland Park in the center of their property where, for many generations, [00:20:00] they lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance."
So they have financial power because they've been able to stay there for generations, but they also have societal power because they have the goodwill of the other people who are surrounding them. It's so cool to me seeing how, if you do close reading, how often anything that you choose can really come up because this book is just so rich with material that you can find pretty much anything. But I'm so glad that we chose power as the first theme that we want to read through, because I think it's so evident in these first five chapters. And you see it in so many different places, whether it's just in the way that the family has been settled at Norland Park or whether it's in the way that Fanny kind of subtly manipulates her husband or in the power that they do or don't have in potential romantic attachments. It shows up everywhere.
Emily: Yeah.
On the subject of power in romantic attachments. One thing that I made a lot of notes about while reading was during this whole exchange between [00:21:00] Elinor and Marianne about Edward and his availability or his potential feelings or Elinor’s potential feelings.
Marianne leans very heavily on what seems to me to be kind of the power of imagination, like manifesting these kind of romantic attachments. Whereas Elinor doesn't seem to put much stock, if any, in that. And of course that goes back to their characterizations as Elinor having sense, Marianne having sensibility. It was just really fascinating to me to see that manifestation of power as a concept coming through in the book. And it also seemed to me that Marianne and their mother entertaining these kind of fantasies reads almost as an attempt to have power in a situation where they really have none.
Lauren: Ooh, yeah, I like that. Talking [00:22:00] about the power of imagination, because even if I can't control my situation, I can control what I think of and what I dream of. And in that place, I have power. Yeah. I never thought about it that way.
Emily: I think perhaps the most indicative sentence of that concept of the power of imagination is Elinor reflecting on Marianne having said, Oh, if you talk about him any more nicely, I won't even think that he's that ugly anymore.
And Elinor reflects, "She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment they believed the next. That with them, to wish was to hope and to hope was to expect."
Lauren: Yeah, I mean but also who among us hasn't decided that their friend's boyfriend was cute, just because they talk about them so often it's like, okay, fine.
I guess he's like a little bit good looking.
Emily: The power of suggestion.
Lauren: The power of suggestion, and that also whatever they conjecture, they believe to be true. It just made me think of like, when you were in middle [00:23:00] school or high school and somebody brings up the possibility like, Oh, but what if, and then you just let your imagination run away with you and all of a sudden that's true —
Emily: Wait, you stopped doing that in middle school?
Lauren: No, I was trying to make it seem like I did, but if you're going to call me out on that, I mean, that's fine. Um, yeah, but I was thinking about, especially in middle school, when you would just decide that like somebody had a crush on someone else and then you would decide to make their every action fit into that idea about them that you had. Like, Oh, well he looked at her for like two seconds longer than he looked at Susie Q, oh my God, he must have a crush on you. And everything that that person now does is twisted to fit whatever you have in your mind, because you've decided to believe that.
That's specifically what I was thinking of. I don't do that anymore, but do I make myself believe other things? Absolutely. Like I make myself believe that Little Mix will tour in America, even though it will never happen.
Stan Culture and Sensibility
Emily: Actually, now that you bring up Little Mix, I was thinking that's a great segue to the pop culture [00:24:00] aspect.
Lauren: Yes, it is.
Emily: Especially the power of imagination and making things fit into what you've decided the world is going to be.
It's been really fascinating to me to watch fans of a thing foist their interpretations on creators. And this happens to more or less extent depending on the kind of fandom and who's, you know, the demographics of the fandom as well as how communicative creators are on various social media platforms.
Basically how much access do fans have to creators, and are they actually exerting influence or are we just gonna get some queer-baiting?
Lauren: Oh God. Yeah. That is a really perfect link into the pop culture connection that I was really excited about for this, was to kind of talk about how you can draw a link between what current fandom looks like and the difference between sense and sensibility. So the difference between being a fan of something and being a stan of [00:25:00] something.
Emily: Please elaborate, because I've never understood the difference. I don't know what a stan is. Help me, Lauren.
Lauren: And I am happy to.
Emily: Teach me, Lauren Wan Kenobi.
Lauren: Let's see if this is the only time I talk about this on this podcast. Probably not. Likely not.
Because I am a Little Mix fan who lives in the United States, the only way that I can find any information about this band is through Twitter, because their label refuses to promote them here and it makes me upset. So I have been adjacent to Stan Twitter for quite some time now. I am unfortunately well versed in what it looks like despite the fact that I am 27 years old.
So being a fan of something is a little bit more casual. You can say that you're a fan of something — let's say I'm a Marvel fan and I go watch the movies, but I'm not engaging in a ton of discourse online. I don't buy up merch as soon as it goes on sale. Like I'm a casual fan. I enjoy it. I can name all the characters for you. You know, I know who Iron Man and Captain [00:26:00] America are, and I probably went to go see the movie like opening weekend, but it's not my full identity.
A stan, on the other hand... there's debate on where the term came from. You as a linguist probably appreciate that. So some people think that it was a combination of stalker and fan and they just put it together to make stan, other people think that it comes from the Eminem song that was called "Stan," which would be even more funny to me because that was meant to be a cautionary tale about how you shouldn't idolize people to the point of stalking them. And then eventually like, driving off of a bridge. Yeah. Listen to the song "Stan" by Eminem. You're not, you don't want to be Stan. That's not what you want to be. So it was really funny to me that we use stan as a verb now, because that was not meant to be something to live up to.
Emily: That's really interesting.
My personal theory, having absolutely no context on any of this would be that — it would probably be the combination of stalker and fan, but [00:27:00] that — I guess what we would call popular etymology of linking it to the Eminem song is really, really fascinating.
Lauren: Yeah, and one of the reasons that it makes me think of the difference between sense and sensibility is because being a stan is usually linked to excess in some way, kind of like sensibility is. Feeling things really deeply and being very connected with your emotions. I think if you're a stan of something, you have a really deep, emotional connection to whatever it is that you are a fan of and that you love so much to the point where you sometimes feel as though you have ownership of it, which goes back again to the relationship that fans have with creators.
But there's also a really interesting power balance as well. Thinking about sense and sensibility, but also thinking about power. If you are "stanning" a person — because people feel so deeply about this — there's this really interesting power balance between the two, because people will do anything for like a notice from the person that they [00:28:00] stan.
I remember when One Direction was a thing, and I see this sometimes with BTS too — let me edit that, because if there any One Direction fans that are listening to this, they're going to be very upset with me — and say One Direction is still a thing. When One Direction was not on hiatus. I'm so sorry, Directioners. I would see in the tweets of any of the four or five members, like, notice me times one, notice me times two, notice me times three, from the same account just posting the same tweet over and over and over again.
And I remember seeing one person, she finally got a reply from Louis Tomlinson. She quote tweeted the reply — and you also will usually see people swamp the replies to the tweet that got the response or a like with like, congratulations, because everybody realizes that you try and get a notice from your fave. You try and get a reply. And you'll put in your Twitter bio, most of the time, “was noticed three times by Louis Tomlinson on X date.”
It's elaborate. But this fan in particular had taped a lollipop or something to her wall. And it said, I'm allowed to finally eat this lollipop when Louis Tomlinson notices me, and it had been [00:29:00] there for like three years and she was like, I could finally take it down. But it's that level of adoration and commitment that you see from stans, which means that if their idols do anything, like if they say jump, they'll say how high. However, on the flip side, media networks and record labels and all these other corporate organizations have realized how much power these fans have when there's millions of them together. I've noticed this pivot going more towards fan voted things and fan engagement, because they know it drives advertising revenue or drives sales. And so you'll see a lot more fan voted awards at the AMAs or things like that, because they know, for example, if you nominate BTS for anything, there's going to be millions of people who are now engaging with whatever your content is.
And so the pop stars or whoever are also really dependent on fans to vote for them for these awards that they can advance for their career, to buy their songs and their tour bundles [00:30:00] and all this kind of stuff. Just as the fans kind of depend on them as well for that next hit of dopamine. I'll see people say like, “Oh, I'm bored. They haven't done anything in like a week. What am I supposed to be doing?” Like any, anything else? You could do a lot of things.
Emily: Yeah. That's definitely not unique to our social media fan culture either. I mean, it happened with Beatlemania. I know it happened with other forms of mass media in earlier centuries as well.
Basically, if something could be widely distributed, there was going to be a fan base that it relied on for financial success. And it's kind of chicken and the egg, you know, did it succeed because it became a huge fan target, right? Or did it become a huge fan target because it was a good product.
Lauren: Yeah. And I guess to be [00:31:00] more succinct because I tend to ramble about this just because it's so fascinating to me, I think the idol or the person who the group is stanning has power over them just by virtue of them being able to have such an influence, for better or for worse, over this large group of people.
But at the same time, they also depend on them for sales, for awards, for all this other stuff. And there's this really interesting dynamic between the two of them, especially because the stans feel so deeply about everything. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but it comes back to like sensibility where it's like, when it's in excess, what happens?
I think it's great that people can feel so deeply about something. I think sometimes adults get away from that and we want to be emotionless and it's like, Oh, we're jaded. And we don't care, blah, blah, blah. But it's wonderful to be able to feel so deeply about something and to be so passionate about seeing your favorite band that you burst into tears.
Like. Yeah, why not go, go [00:32:00] on, go live your best life. Be happy. Do whatever makes you happy.
Emily: Feel joy, please.
Lauren: Exactly. And then the excess is when it comes to like, hacking into an airport camera to watch One Direction.
Emily: Oh.
Lauren: Mmhmm.
That is legend. So, yeah, that was, that was my pop culture connection that I thought of was sense and sensibility, being a casual fan of something and enjoying it versus being a stan of something and hacking into an airport camera, literally just to watch them sit at their gate.
That was it.
Emily: I'm still processing that.
So that was — wow.
Just that one piece of information packed… such a punch.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. With both One Direction and BTS, with BTS especially, it's if you gave Beatlemania Twitter.
Emily: Humans have always been the same.
Lauren: Always! People act like the BTS fandom, especially, is something new. I'm like, but did you guys see people passing out when the Beatles showed up or passing out when Michael Jackson, like, turned his [00:33:00] head on stage? Like the man could literally just look at you and people would pass out, like this is not new.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, people have, we've always been programmed — and maybe I'm getting too anthropological with this — but yeah. Honestly, living in a big social group like we do and like we have done for centuries, for millennia, we find extreme joy in these things. We have a lot of feelings and we gotta put them somewhere.
And so we find media that we enjoy and we put our efforts towards that.
Lauren: Yeah. And I think too, I still see the connection these days to where, you know, in Jane Austen's time, sensibility was considered something that was more female. And today we still see like the excess of emotion being attributed to women, especially.
Emily: Oh, yeah, it's the teenage girl effect.
Lauren: Oh, it's the teenage girl effect and a healthy dose of just your regular [00:34:00] old misogyny and toxic masculinity to where, you know, men are just as emotional.
They're just not allowed to show it.
Emily: Let men have feelings.
Lauren: Let men have feelings, 2020!
Emily: Feelings that aren't violence.
Lauren: Please. For the good of everyone. But it just makes me think about how sensibility is still considered mostly female today. Sensibility, sentimentality, whatever you want to call it. It's still mostly women. And even though feeling deeply, I think, could and should be considered a virtue, it's still looked down upon like ugh, you care about things.
How dare you.
Emily: Well, I think it's perceived also as a lack of self-control.
Lauren: Mmhmm, absolutely.
Emily: Not having power over your own emotions.
Lauren: Women are too emotional.
Emily: Exactly. And it just bursts out.
Final Takeaways
Lauren: Okay.
So Emily, what are your final takeaways from this first section of Sense and Sensibility?
Emily: I think my final takeaways have to do with the socially [00:35:00] circumscribed definitions of power. Who is allowed to have it and to wield it publicly, and who has to be more subtle about it.
What about you, Lauren? What's your takeaway?
Lauren: My final takeaway is that Fanny sucks. Um, not really. My takeaway is that Fanny is actually very intelligent. I just don't like the way in which she's wielding her intelligence.
I think I'm similar to you. My takeaway is thinking about who has power and in what way, and then who does power make visible, I think is my biggest takeaway. So who has visibility either in the public sphere or even in the private sphere, because you think about how servants or children or whoever are meant to be seen and not heard, or sometimes not even seen. And they mentioned at one point that they were taking — what is it? Like two girls and a boy with them to like to set up the house ahead of [00:36:00] time who, you know, are never named.
So thinking about who power makes visible, who power rends invisible and whose stories get to be told, I think is what I take away from this section.
Emily: Thank you so much for joining us for this premiere episode of Reclaiming Jane. Episode two will be released on December 30, when we'll be looking at Sense and Sensibility, chapters 6 through 10, through the lens of gender.
Lauren: You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @ReclaimingJane, visit our website, reclaimingjanepod.com.
And if you'd like to follow us on Twitter in time for a live tweet of Bridgerton on December 25th, although it is not necessarily related to Jane Austen itself, we were not going to miss the opportunity to talk about a fantastic diverse period piece. We'll be live tweeting from our Reclaiming Jane Twitter account the first few episodes of Bridgerton, if you would like to [00:37:00] join for that.
Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. Our music is by LaTasha Bundy.
We'll see you next time.
[fade out, fade in]
Emily: Uh, is it too soon to bring up Supernatural?
Lauren: Oh, no! So we are recording this right after Destiel became canon in case you're wondering why we're laughing. I honestly thought that we had left Supernatural in like 2013, but I forgot how big of a fandom it was. And I always forget that it's still going.
Emily: Yeah, I was never in the Supernatural fandom.
Lauren: Nor was I.
Emily: But I witnessed people who were.
Lauren: And we were on Tumblr in 2012.
Emily: We were on Tumblr in 2012!
Lauren: SuperWhoLock will never die!
Emily: For better and for worse, mostly for worse, we were on Tumblr in 2012.
