Sense and Sensibility 11-15: “Race and Regency”
In Episode 3, Emily and Lauren use chapters 11-15 of Sense & Sensibility to facilitate a conversation on racial diversity in history, in fiction, and in the present day. Also included: busting myths, making bets, and spoiler-free discussion of the new hit Netflix series Bridgerton.
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Show Notes
We’re back in top form this episode, despite a myriad of obstacles that popped up during recording (crying babies, multiple trains going by, singing birds…all things that you don’t want in your podcast episodes). This was a fun episode to record, in part because it was so different from our first two. We were able to dive more into Regency history and use the words on the page to talk metaphorically about race relations today.
And, of course, we couldn’t pass up the perfectly timed opportunity to discuss Bridgerton. Most of what made it into this episode are our critiques of the season, but we did genuinely enjoy the show. Bring on season two! (And three, and four, and…)
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Episode 3 | Sense and Sensibility 11-15: “Race and Regency”
Introductions
[music begins playing]
[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 talking about chapters 11 through 15 of Sense and Sensibility with the topic of race to guide our conversation.
[music continues, fades out]
Lauren: Welcome back everyone for episode three of Reclaiming Jane, we're happy you've decided to join us again.
Emily: In this new year, in 2021. Finally.
Lauren: We made it through, everybody.
Emily: We made it through the last decade of 2020.
Lauren: Amen to that. The last -- December really was a decade all on its own.
Emily: It truly was, truly was.
Lauren: I am always looking forward to fresh starts, new pages in my planner. So very happy about --
Emily: I have an entirely new planner.
Lauren: You do have an entirely new planner!
Emily: I have an entirely new planner. It's so beautiful. I set it up last night. I'm not a nerd.
Lauren: Not at all. That's okay. I, we both are giant nerds, which is why this podcast works so well.
Emily: Yes. This is why we've been best friends for literally, almost a decade now.
Lauren: Oh my gosh. It is.
Emily: Yeah. This fall, it'll be 10 years that we've known each other.
Lauren: Oh my gosh.
Emily: Like within six months, like, you were my best friend.
Lauren: Yeah. That's accurate. I went back in our Facebook friendship to see how often we posted about Jane Austen on each other's Facebook walls. And it was a ridiculous amount. This was meant to be.
Emily: It's weird, frankly, because the only Jane Austen I had ever read in its entirety was Pride and Prejudice. I mean, still, I still have never read any Austen to completion except Pride and Prejudice.
Lauren: I'm glad you mentioned that because I realized that we hadn't actually said that on the podcast, that you haven't read Sense and Sensibility before.
So there's no future [00:02:00] conversation about, "Oh, well we know this happens," because you don't know what happens yet.
Emily: Yeah, literally, please. No one spoil me for --
Lauren: For this book that's been out for 200 years!
Emily: 200 years, but I can still have opinions in the meanwhile. I, I think Elinor and Colonel Brandon should get together, but --
Lauren: Oh, do you?
Emily: I suspect that's not going to happen because he's in love with Marianne.
30 Second Recaps
Emily: Okay. 30-second recaps. I think it's your turn to go first.
Lauren: It is my turn, which is going to not work in my favor, but we're going to roll with it.
Emily: Are you ready?
Lauren: Ready as I'll ever be.
Emily: Good enough. On your mark. Get set. Go.
Lauren: Okay, Marianne and Willoughby are spending a lot of time together to the point where Elinor thinks that they're engaged. Because otherwise, it's completely improper for them to be always together and always talking to one another and having inside jokes as often. The group of people who they socialize with most often decides that they want to go to a place that Colonel Brandon owns. Colonel Brandon is called away on business back to London.
So they're not able to go. The group was very unhappy about it. And then we find out that he might have a love child?! Also Willoughby goes back to London and Marianne is very upset.
Emily: Nice!
Lauren: Made it!
Emily: Nice, you did it.
Lauren: All right. Emily. 30 seconds on the clock.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: On your mark. Get set. Go.
Emily: Okay. So the Dashwoods have been spending a lot of time with the Middletons and with all of their neighbors and just generally having a good time. Marianne and Willoughby are very close and assumed by everybody to be practically engaged. Then Colonel Brandon gets called to London on some kind of mysterious business that he won't talk about. And then Willoughby is also called away and Marianne is very extremely upset.
Lauren: Beautiful.
Additional Sense and Sensibility Plot Details
Emily: Thank you. Okay. So, do we want to explain in a little more depth the context of what's going on here?
Lauren: We can do that, [00:04:00] especially for people who maybe haven't read the books ever, or for whom it's been quite some time since they've read the books, because until I started rereading Sense and Sensibility for this podcast, I hadn't read it since 2013, so I certainly forgot a lot of details.
Emily: The Dashwoods have been settling in at Barton Cottage. Marianne and Willoughby are still very close. They're spending a lot of time together. He's always there at the cottage, getting very attached to the cottage itself, apparently, because he's just, is totally indignant when Mrs. Dashwood mentions that she wants to renovate the place.
Lauren: It's like a whole three-page scene of him insisting that they cannot change anything because he loves it so much. Yeah.
Emily: Like my guy... this is where they live, not you. Chill? Maybe? But the Dashwoods are sort of getting to know the neighborhood. The Middletons, especially Sir John, have been inviting them to all sorts of things, even though it's like October and. Like, they're like, okay. It's, it's too cold outside to be like, picnicking, but sure. I guess.
Lauren: It's been cold. It's been rainy. It's the UK in October. It's not very pleasant.
Emily: But Sir John is determined to entertain. And Mrs. Jennings doesn't seem to mind either because it means that she can gossip about Marianne and Willoughby.
Lauren: To her heart's content. And then also continue gossiping about Colonel Brandon when he's called off to London, because she is the one who happens to reveal that she thinks he has a natural daughter, which is extremely scandalous.
Of course she says, "Oh no, I couldn't tell you. I'm going to tell you. I think he has a natural daughter." It takes her all of two seconds to say, well, "Oh I shouldn't, but I will."
Emily: Yeah. Two seconds and no prompting whatsoever.
Lauren: None. She could have kept that to herself. But of course she doesn't.
Emily: Yeah. I got to say, when I read that I texted Lauren, I was like, okay. I did not have bastard [00:06:00] child on my Sense and Sensibility bingo, but sure.
Lauren: Especially not from Colonel Brandon. You know, Willoughby, sure.
Emily: Right. Yeah.
Lauren: I wouldn't be surprised.
Emily: So Colonel Brandon has gone to London to deal with something that Mrs. Jennings thinks involves a Miss Williams, who she thinks is his natural daughter. We'll see about this. I'm skeptical.
Lauren: Colonel Brandon is the only one who can let them into this place. And so they can't go without him. And so they resolve to have fun anyway. And Marianne and Willoughby take a carriage around and seem very windblown and happy by the time they come back. Honestly, it reminded me, I grew up in the Midwest so it reminded me of people taking out four-wheelers and just like riding around whatever huge strip of land that they have, because it's the Midwest and it's empty and there's nothing.
And then coming back and just looking very flushed and windswept, and it turns out that not only did they take the carriage and go for a joy ride, but they went to go see a home that Marianne thinks could be hers if she gets engaged, which is extremely improper, they're were not meant to be there on their own.
Emily: Especially because this home is, it's not Willoughby's. He does not own it. He's, what, staying there at the behest of this... What is she, a cousin?
Lauren: I don't know.
Emily: Mrs. Smith. I think she was a distant relation, but it's somehow like, it's going to be his one day, but this Mrs. Smith doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. So they were just wandering around and Marianne's already, like, making notes about how to rearrange parlors and things like, honey, you might be jumping the gun just a little bit. But then Mrs. Smith sends Willoughby off to town to do some business or other. He refuses to elaborate [00:08:00] and then makes it clear that he's going to be gone for a while.
Lauren: And was very cagey about refusing to elaborate, too. He's not his normal, charming self. So Elinor and her mother come home from whatever outing they were on. Because I think Elinor's mother thought that if Willoughby hadn't proposed already, he was going to propose to Marianne. And so it was like, "we'll just make ourselves absent for a little bit of time and then we'll come back and maybe we'll have happy news." But instead of coming back to Marianne announcing that we were officially engaged, she comes back to Marianne running in tears from the parlor, and Willoughby leaning against the fireplace, looking very upset and then refusing to elaborate on why he needs to go away.
Just being very angsty and very evasive about what exactly is happening and by the end of the day, and by the end of the chapter, Marianne still hasn't told them what's going on.
Emily: Hmm. So it's just mysteries, but now both of Marianne's prospective suitors have gone away on business for indeterminate amounts of time. Both Colonel Brandon and Willoughby are just gone.
Lauren: Yeah. So at the beginning of chapter 11, we have lovebirds Marianne and Willoughby. And by the end of chapter 15, Marianne is devastated and Willoughby is gone and we don't know why.
Emily: Yeah.
Historical Context
Lauren: Emily, will you start off our discussion of this section of Sense and Sensibility with some of the historical notes that you have for today?
Emily: Absolutely. So in our previous episodes, my history has focused on issues that are directly represented in the text because we've talked about power, we've talked about gender, but because our theme today is race and that's not explicitly an issue here, I decided to, instead, give the historical context of racial diversity in England, because that's not a topic that most people know a lot about.
If they know anything. It's [00:10:00] certainly something that I don't know a lot about. So listeners, please be aware. This is not my area of expertise. There are people out there who have done years and years of work on this topic. This is what I've gotten from a couple hours on the internet. So if you have more knowledge, please do share it. I would love to know more.
It's historical fact. It was not just white people in England beginning at least in the Roman period.
Lauren: Ooh.
Emily: Yeah. So there is archeological evidence. There are burials of people of African ancestry, especially North African, but some Sub-Saharan Africans as well, who lived in England and were buried there.
Lauren: It's always nice having evidence that we didn't just show up in the 20th century like people seem to believe that we did. So please continue.
Emily: I would love to. So there is confirmed presence of several different groups, at least from the 1500s, there was a continuous presence of Black individuals and then Black communities established at least in the mid-1500s. There were several scholars who traveled from, I believe, Sub-Saharan Africa, who came to England to learn English and study. And from then on, basically there was some presence of varying significance in England of African communities and their descendants.
Then we get to 1600, which is when the East India Company is established, which directly led to the immigration of Indians and other South Asians to England at first. It seems there was a not insignificant number of people who were essentially pressed into service. They were forcibly taken to England.
And then were told [00:12:00] actually, no, you don't get a ride back. You have to stay here.
Lauren: The British seem to have a track record of this.
Emily: They do. They do indeed. Following that, as trade routes became better established and more goods and people were moving along them, people began to immigrate willingly, voluntarily, often coming in servant roles.
Some would begin serving British families while in South Asia, while in India, and then basically traveled with those families back to England when they returned. There was, of course also the so-called triangular trade, which fed slave markets, taking individuals from Africa to the West Indies to the Americas and as well to England.
So this was really interesting. I'm just, you know, scraping the surface of slavery in England, because it's kind of a contentious topic. People like to say, "Oh, you know, there wasn't slavery in England. That's not a thing." So it's actually pretty complex history. Legal decisions in 1569 and 1706 established and codified that slavery was not positively legal in England.
Lauren: They decided that twice?
Emily: Yes, 1569, there was a legal decision that basically said -- okay. Like it wasn't actually codified in law. There was no legislation that says, "yes, there is slavery here, and this is how it works," but it wasn't explicitly outlawed either. And so it continued to be practiced. So in 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that an [00:14:00] enslaved person could not be transported outside the kingdom of England against their will.
Lauren: Hmm.
Emily: So there was a, an enslaved man who had attempted to escape and his enslaver tried to basically, as punishment, have him sent to Jamaica and sold off. And Lord Mansfield said, no, you can't actually do that.
Lauren: So it didn't outlaw slavery, but just said, you can't send them out of England against their will. You can still enslave a person. But you can't send them anywhere else.
Emily: And even formerly enslaved people had a really tenuous position in England. One example is the about a thousand formerly enslaved men who had joined the British side in the American Revolution, pursuing the promise of freedom once the war was over.
And so they were granted passage to England, they were given their freedom, but because of the poor relief laws in England, because they had been enslaved, rather than quote unquote employed, they weren't eligible for that relief. And so they were denied pensions. They were denied access to the regular poor relief and contributed pretty significantly to the visibility of what they called the “black poor phenomenon” in England.
Lauren: These are things that you just don't learn in American history classes.
Emily: Yeah. So that was really interesting to me learning about what exactly the visibility of black people, both free and enslaved was in England throughout these times. And of course, it was different depending on the position in society as well.
So the majority of black communities -- of immigrant communities in general -- were concentrated in port cities, but it wasn't strictly segregated, especially [00:16:00] in the lower classes. So mixed-race marriages were not really viewed as problematic in these lower classes because the stratification was focused more on class than on race.
Lauren: That's such a difference from the way that it was in the United States, where regardless of class, it was really strictly forbidden to be able to marry across races because they were specifically trying to preserve the purity of the white race because of the way that race was conceived in the US and the way that people thought about race.
There's obviously exceptions such as New Orleans, for example, where people were intermixing since the conception of the city, because it was French before it was American and they really resisted American ideas of race, but you don't see interracial marriage as widely, socially acceptable in the US until the 20th century, literally.
Emily: The second half of the century!
Lauren: The second half of the 20th century.
Emily: The last quarter of the 20th century, even.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: And still, in some pockets of the country it is still not acceptable.
Emily: Mixed race marriages in the lower classes that was, I don't know if it was acceptable, but it happened and it didn't really stand out as being a major issue. The legal system did continue to legitimize this belief in the inherent inferiority of nonwhite people and especially nonwhite immigrants, but it's not really clear to me, at least from this again, very brief research that I did, how people really characterized or how people conceived of race in the period that Sense and Sensibility was written and published. There definitely seems to be a more solid idea of foreigners as a different subset of the population, but I don't know to what extent, say, [00:18:00] our current understanding of race as, like, color would have held up.
And then again, of course, as I said, immigrant populations, nonwhite populations are mostly concentrated in port cities. Whereas our main characters, our Dashwoods are out in the country. It's unclear what extent of experience they might have in places like London. So they may have had only the most superficial experience passing a black person in the street or employing, uh, an Indian servant in their wherever they stay in town. So it's not likely that they would come into extensive contact with people of other races, I would think.
Lauren: I think that's, that is a really good example of why people have the misconception that people of color weren't in the UK at this time period, because so much of the literature from that time period that we still read is about a very specific social class.
We're not reading classic books about what the lower classes of England were doing most of the time that are from this time period. And so you get the impression because we're never mentioned that we just weren't there, but it's really just that they weren't having meaningful interactions with people of this social class.
If you're in a country seat in the middle of nowhere, England, more than likely there's not that much diversity for you to interact with, but if you are somebody who works on the docks in London, on the other hand, your experience probably would have been much different.
Emily: Absolutely. If you're living in a middle or lower-class area, in a city, even if it's not a port city, but in a city, you're much more likely to interact daily with people who are not white.
[00:20:00] Of course, people of color, people of different races were not limited to the lower classes. There were people, especially of mixed race who accessed higher social status as well. One of them was Dido Belle. Her mother was an enslaved woman. Her father was a white military officer. She was raised in the household of her uncle, Lord Mansfield, and therefore experienced a very different way of life than many people, especially first-generation immigrants who spent their lives in cities and below a certain standing in society. There were also people like Queen Charlotte, who was descended from a black branch of the Portuguese Royal family. She's often not recognized today as being of mixed race. I believe it was several generations back.
Lauren: Yeah, it gets into that tricky definition of what do you define as race? Whose definition of race are you going by? Are we using the American one-drop rule? But regardless, it's in her family tree. In my head, Queen Charlotte is black. That's just what I'm going to go with, regardless of what actually may have been, depending on your definition of race, I'm just going to hold on to the fact that there was a Black Monarch in the United Kingdom royal family, because I just enjoy having that image in my head.
Anything else, history-wise that you wanted to add?
Emily: I think that was about it.
Lauren: Okay. I really appreciate being able to learn more about people of color in Regency England, but even in just history in general, because I think because history itself has been so whitewashed, it's hard to get an accurate depiction of what society actually looked like, especially because in the US history education is very hit or miss, depending on where you live, what your state education curriculum was, who your teacher was, you know, honestly, who knows what kind of an education you got with [00:22:00] regards to history. And so it's easy to continue with the misconceptions that people of color kind of just popped up in the 20th century, depending on which country you're focusing on.
And that we were just nowhere to be seen prior to that. But that's far from the case, regardless of what is portrayed in popular culture or in the books that we've read, Black and Brown people have existed in both the UK and in the United States for much longer than history textbooks, usually tend to admit to.
Emily: Absolutely. And I had to stop myself before I got so far as to look up actual census data from the early 1800s. But the commonly quoted number of just Black people in England in the early 1800s is somewhere between 10 and 30,000.
Lauren: Wow.
Emily: I saw that number quoted in several different places, but I'm not sure if that was just in London or if it was in England at large.
Lauren: Okay.
Emily: Being a large port city, I would think that London would have a larger population than most of the rest of the country, but still that's -- they were up to 30,000 Black people in England during the Regency period. So they certainly weren't a novelty.
Metaphorical Reading of Sense and Sensibility
Lauren: We were there, just maybe not in the books that we read.
That takes me into one of the things that I wanted to talk about for this section. Because, similar to Emily -- so we choose the themes that we're going to read through before we read the section. So we have the themes lined up for most of the book already. And so we just decided to see where they pop up as we read, rather than assigning a theme after we've already read the section, which is why we have a theme of race for a section where race isn't explicitly talked about.
But what I wanted to do was kind of look to see how we could use it metaphorically. So I want to be super clear that I'm not claiming that Jane Austen was secretly writing about white privilege in 1813, but instead, I want to use [00:24:00] the interactions in the book as a jumping off point for further discussion and use them metaphorically.
Instead of trying to say, this is the meaning that you should assign to the text because it's not meant to be there. I'm using it as a metaphor. I just want to be abundantly clear about that so people don't think I'm trying to put 21st-century readings onto Jane Austen's authorial intent 200 years ago.
So we will see if this is actually a good reading and metaphor, or if this has no basis whatsoever. But I think, I think you can draw parallels here. There's a couple of scenes that I wanted to look at. So one is where, I believe it's in chapter 11 or 12, when Marianne is gifted a horse from Willoughby.
Emily: That was wild.
Lauren: That was a decision. And despite the evidence in favor of her not accepting this gift, as Elinor tries to point out to her repeatedly, she insists that everything is going to work out. And she rebuffs Elinor for bringing up reasonable objections, like how much money it's going to take, that they'd have to build a stable for the horse, that their mom would probably have to hire another servant, which again, costs even more money.
And Marianne just keeps insisting. No, it's going to work out, it's fine, don't worry about it until Elinor finally relates it to her mother and says, think of all the things that Mom will have to go without, basically, to be able to give you this horse because she will not say no to you. She will say yes, but we don't have the money for it. And she's going to have to cut back on a lot of different things. And only then is when Marianne actually gets it.
It reminded me of situations where white people want to do something very basic with a friend of color and don't understand why it's either impossible or not practical for that person to do, just because they've never had to think about it before.
And one of the things that specifically came to mind is when, mostly when I was in high school or something like that, where I would be afraid to do something that seemed more mundane to my [00:26:00] white friends, because they could do something and know that they would be fine. Something as small as, Oh, we want to get somewhere really fast.
So just like we will take the highway. You can go like 75. It will be fine. No, I can not go 75 on the highway and expect that it will be fine because it will be my luck that I get pulled over. And I don't know what's going to happen to me when I get pulled over. If I get pulled over, is it going to be a positive interaction or is it going to be a negative one?
Am I going to be terrified sitting behind the wheel or is it going to be somebody who's actually kind and literally is just going to give me a ticket and walk away. 10,000 other things that I have to think about versus the people who I went to high school with. And that was one of the things that this interaction with Marianne made me think of, was Marianne doesn't have to think about anything because these things don't affect her life. And why should she? And Elinor is the one who has to be the voice of reason.
Emily: Not to jump into pop culture too early. I think one of the most clear examples of that specific interaction that we've seen in the last few years that most people would have had access to was the episode of Queer Eye when they're in Georgia to makeover a police officer.
And I don't know if it was the production team who organized this, but essentially they pulled over a car full of queer men by a Southern white police officer. And was it Karamo behind the wheel, was a black man behind the wheel?
Lauren: I think Karamo was driving.
Emily: Yeah. And you can see the abject terror on his face. Not having any idea what's about to happen.
And even watching that as a white woman who was raised in the South, like oh my God, did they really think that that was funny? That that's a fun joke to play?
Lauren: It makes you wonder who's in the room to make that decision because had there been a black person on the production team, they would have been able to say, no, this is something that's potentially scarring.
Don't [00:28:00] do that. It's not funny. And I, you see that sometimes with viral videos that happen from police departments who think they're being funny with, “we're pulling you over. But actually, we just want to tell you to have a good day.” No, don't do that. There's too much history associated with that for it to just be funny and for me to just move on with my day, like, "Oh great. I wasn't actually being pulled over. They wanted to give me a gift card to Walmart, or they just want to tell me to have a good day." You could have mailed that to my house without causing that spike of adrenaline that I feel when I see lights behind me in my rearview mirror, don't -- don't do it.
Don't do that.
Emily: And as a white person, that's not a fear that I've ever had to live with. Obviously, I don't want to get pulled over. I don't want to get in trouble, but that's the worst consequence that I would face. If I were pulled over, I might get a ticket, but that's definitely something that I, I had not considered until I became close friends with a black woman and started educating myself about the different concerns that black people face in the United States today. And I've learned a lot in the last 10 years, but still, I, I know that it's something that most people, white people, even white people with the best intentions don't think about.
Lauren: Yeah. Best intentions actually is a perfect lead-in to the other scene that I wanted to look at, where they are about to go on their grand outing, and Colonel Brandon comes back into the room after receiving the letter and says he's actually not able to go. And Colonel Brandon is clearly very uncomfortable and does not want to explain why it is that he has to go back to London and why he's being called away so suddenly.
But the rest of the party, one, doesn't want to hear it because his truth is inconvenient to them, because that means that they can't go anywhere and they can't have the fun that they wanted to have today. So they would prefer that he remained uncomfortable and come with them rather than inconvenience them by something that's clearly distressing him.
And then, two, ignore [00:30:00] his discomfort and continue prying about why it is that he needs to leave. And even though he's clearly upset and is telling them it can't wait, they don't. Listen. And what that made me think of was white people not wanting to hear hard truths about race and racism, because it means that acknowledging reality would ruin the fun.
I think when people think about racism, they think about the really overt types of racism and it's like, "Oh, well, I don't use any racial slurs and I don't discriminate actively against people. So I'm not part of the problem." And then when people of color actually say, "well, here are the ways that you might be part of the problem or ways that you've benefited from a racist system that has been set up to benefit you and disadvantage me," then all of a sudden, it's too close to home and it hurts. And it's, "no no, I would rather not hear this inconvenient truth and keep you uncomfortable so that I don't have to deal with my own discomfort. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it. I would prefer that it stay over there."
Which is a natural response to having your privilege challenged because it's difficult to have to change your worldview. And you could apply that to ableism, for example, like abled people don't want to hear about the ways that the world isn't set up for people who are differently-abled, because then you have to contend with the fact that, "Oh, maybe I could have been being more inclusive the whole time, and I've hurt other people" and you don't want to think about that.
And that hurts, but you have to, because that's the only way that we can create a society that works for everyone and not just who people in power have decided that it should work for.
So that, that was one of the parallels that I was thinking of because of course, then they end the scene with completely ignoring that he's uncomfortable, even though it's very evident and continue to push for what makes them comfortable and what accommodates them and their desires for that day.
Even though it's so trivial, all they want to do is just go have fun. It's cold. You don't need to go, just acknowledge this person's discomfort and keep it moving. That's it. That's all they had to do, but they refuse. That was the metaphorical reading. And just to close out, just to reiterate, this is not meant to be a [00:32:00] literal interpretation.
I'm not saying that white privilege is coloring their interactions with another white person. Just being able to extrapolate from this and look at how we can relate that to things that happen in real life today.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, that's one of the most important functions of fiction, really, is to look at these fictional situations and, whether or not they're directly relevant, to be able to extrapolate from that and recognize real-life situations. That's why it's so important to read fiction of all kinds and to study different things.
Lauren: Yeah. Being able to relate it to your own life, regardless of whether or not that book was set in your culture or set in your time period, being able to look at things that have been written fictionally in that book and being able to pull out metaphor or meaning or things that you can relate to your own life.
You know, on a lighter note, we can talk about how Mrs. Jennings is completely a Karen, you know, another way that you can just connect things that happen in 1813 to 2021.
Emily: You're so right.
Lauren: So for those of you who are blessedly unaware of what a Karen is...
Emily: First off, I envy you.
Lauren: I s -- I so envy you. Urban Dictionary defines a Karen as "a middle-aged woman, typically blonde, who makes solutions to others' problems an inconvenience to her, although she isn't even remotely affected."
And to which I would add, always in black folks’ business, for some reason.
Emily: I just, I don't even have anything to add to that because you're so correct. There's nothing that I can say.
Lauren: Yeah, she's pestering. She gloats over knowledge that she has. She's gossiping about this person's love child. And even her daughter tries to call her out in saying, you know, maybe let this go.
Maybe don't be so improper with poking at him. And she does not listen at all. One thing in favor of Lady Middleton is that she at least tried to rein her mother in, in that instance. She kind of sucks the rest of the time, but in this instance [00:34:00] she did the right thing.
Emily: Hey, at least she's not Fanny Dashwood.
Lauren: Amen to that. I'm glad that she hasn't reappeared in these last couple of sections because we would just be talking about how much we dislike her again. And we don't need that. This is the Fanny Dashwood hate club.
Emily: Yep.
Race & Bridgerton
Lauren: All right. Shall we talk about our pop culture connection for this section of Sense and Sensibility?
Emily: Please, because I think it fits in really well with what we've just said about the importance of fiction.
Lauren: It does. And it also ties in very much so to a TV show that has the period piece fandom abuzz, the rest of the world abuzz with how many viewers it got in its first couple of weeks, we are of course talking about Bridgerton. Well, let's have a conversation about this show. Emily, what were your thoughts about Bridgerton?
Just off the bat.
Emily: Yeah, just off the bat, superficial level. I thought it was really fun. It was beautiful to watch.
Lauren: The colors, the costumes, the lighting... it's perfect.
Emily: There are plenty of little historical nitpicks I could make, but I don't want to, because it's historical fantasy. It's not trying to be historically accurate.
It's just fun.
Lauren: If they were going for realism, they wouldn't have had fireworks in the first episode. It just -- or string quartet versions of Ariana Grande. I feel like people should have just gotten that right off the bat, that realism wasn't what they were shooting for here.
Emily: Yeah. For some reason, people have decided that 'period piece' means, "Oh, they're trying to portray exactly what the society would have been," that's -- no.
Lauren: This might be an unpopular opinion in period piece fandom just in general. But because I don't have as much of the intricate historical knowledge, it's not as important to me. I know there are some subsets of the fandom where that's something that's the most important thing. I don't, I don't really mind if this dress was popular [00:36:00] in 1840, rather than, than 1810, because I won't be able to tell the difference. I don't know.
Emily: And even as someone who can tell the difference, because I'm an enthusiast for historical fashion, I don't really care that much.
They're not accurate. I don't care.
Lauren: So speaking of gripes with Bridgerton and also tying it into our theme for today, I am once again asking Netflix to find dark-skinned actresses under the age of 35. I promise you they are there and they are fantastic and they will happily add whatever element you're looking for to your show.
But across -- this is not just a Bridgerton problem. This is a Netflix problem. Nine times out of 10, if they have a black woman on their show, she is more light-skinned. And I don't say this as one skin tone is more, has more of a claim to blackness than another skin tone because that -- A) it's not true. And B) not the point that I want to make it all.
However, because living in predominantly white spaces has shifted how, even within the racial group, what is considered beautiful and what's not, and proximity to whiteness is always going to give you a leg up, at least in the mainstream beauty standards, it is more common and more acceptable to have lighter-skinned people in the roles that are meant for black people, rather than dark skin people, which is something that gets on my nerves because they will say, "Oh, we have representation" and representation is the same type of person every single time. And there's a whole subset of the population that still gets left out and we still don't get to see ourselves represented because they insist on casting a very specific phenotype of person.
Emily: Also, I think we really need to lean into the 97 Cinderella —
Lauren: Yes!
Emily: — casting. Where, why do all of your [00:38:00] families in these fantasy history pieces look exactly the same? That's so boring. Like, I'm sorry. Why are none of the Bridgertons Black or Asian?
Lauren: If it's supposed to be diverse, where the South Asians, where the East Asians, like where are my Latinx people, but if you're going, if you're going to say it's diverse, don't go halfway.
We do not have to be satisfied with crumbs. It is now 2021. If we're going to, if we're going to make it diverse. Let's go the whole thing. And like you said --
Emily: Make Whoopi Goldberg your mother.
Lauren: Why not? Why can't we have a white King and a black queen and a Filipino son? I think that people need to be more creative in their casting and they also need to step away from the safe quote-unquote Black casting choices, because there are a ton of Black actors and actresses out there who don't pass your paper bag test, who I'm sure would love work.
Emily: And who we see in other films.
Lauren: Hello.
Emily: Who are -- they're fantastic actors. And instead, you're casting mediocre white people. And I say this as a mediocre white person.
Lauren: You are not mediocre.
Emily: Oh, thank you.
Lauren: I just, I want better for people who look like me. That's all I ask.
Emily: Because there were people who looked like you in the Regency period!
Lauren: Okay. So that actually brings me to another question. How do we feel about their explanation for why there were so many people of color in Queen Charlotte's court? So they said, I think episode three or four, that -- Lady Danbury is talking to Simon, the Duke of Hastings and is saying that because the King married Queen Charlotte, who was explicitly black, it opened up opportunities for people of color to then be in court and to be in higher stations. And that's like the Bridgerton universe explanation for why there's so many people there. What were your thoughts about that?
Emily: I was kind of annoyed that they put that in there.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: I thought, you know, [00:40:00] okay, this is a fantasy period piece. Why do you have to have some kind of logical explanation for why there are black people who can be dukes and duchesses, just let them be there. Don't put that kind of racial anxiety into this escapist piece.
Lauren: Somebody --
Emily: Why bother?
Lauren: Yeah. Someone made a good point.
I don't remember if this was an article I was reading or if it was one of the many times where I was just scrolling through the hashtag on Twitter. Where somebody pointed out that if you're going to go with this explanation for why there were so many people of color in the 1% of Britain at this time, that that means that not so long ago, they weren't there, which means that there should have been technically racial tensions between the people in the society, because it's still relatively new.
So then you introduce that aspect with that sentence, but then don't acknowledge it because it's still historical fantasy. And so there can't be actually any racial tensions that are happening, but by including that sentence, you've just set that up.
And the optics similarly, cause I think that's really the best word to use, were uncomfortable to me earlier in the season where we first find out that Marina, who is the Featheringtons' Black cousin from the countryside, has come to stay with them for the season. And we eventually find out that Marina is pregnant. And so then they have to go through these whole schemes, trying to find her a husband before her shame is made public and bring shame upon the rest of the family and yada yada yada.
And the first husband that Lady Featherington first chooses for Marina is this old, creepy, sleazy white guy who appraises her when he first meets her and is like opening her mouth and like, turning her head from side to side. And so me watching this --
Emily: I almost turned it off at that.
Lauren: It was so uncomfortable and I can't believe that nobody watched that back and didn't say, "Hm, I know this is a historical fantasy, [00:42:00] but doesn't this uncomfortably remind you of the slave market? Maybe we should have directed the scene differently." Nobody said anything about it.
Emily: That's explicitly a visual reference to the way enslavers would inspect the people that they were trying to trade off as property.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: It was so deeply uncomfortable and not in a,"Oh, I don't want to confront my privilege way that we talked about earlier," but a, "you literally did not have to do this."
Lauren: Mm-mm. Nope. It was just, that was unnecessary. And because there was so many other scenes where you could see that he made her uncomfortable. You didn't, it was unnecessary to also have that scene there because we already understood. It wasn't necessary for the viewer to get that he made her uncomfortable.
We got that already without having that really uncomfortable visual language. And I, it goes by, and it's maybe like that part of it is maybe 10 seconds. But it stuck with me. I really just did not like that.
Emily: Absolutely.
Lauren: I'm also not rooting for Daphne's baby bangs. Those needed to go.
Emily: Oh God.
Lauren: They were so awful.
Emily: She looked like she was 12 the whole time. I don't like, I don't know how old the actress is, but they did her a disservice in the styling department. Also, all of her dresses were boring. Sorry.
Lauren: I did see that it was renewed for like another seven seasons.
Emily: That was nuts. Okay.
Lauren: Yeah, they had something like 63 million viewers in the first two weeks, absolutely smashed record viewing numbers for Netflix, for Christmas.
Emily: All right. So Netflix, you have our critiques now, act on them.
Lauren: Please take those into account. Oh, the last thing that I will say, it slipped my mind temporarily, however, my one last request of Netflix is that there is no way, you cannot convince me that Benedict Bridgerton is 100% straight. You cannot do it.
Emily: You, you have so much opportunity to [00:44:00] improve upon what you've laid down. Give us gay Benedict.
Lauren: That's all I want! Bisexual Benedict. You know, he can still like women.
Emily: Yes. We love the bisexuals.
Lauren: He is, he would be such a good disaster bi.
Emily: My God.
Lauren: Make it happen.
Emily: Second son, come on.
Lauren: It was right there.
Emily: That's the perfect disaster bi. Also, also. So my one last thing I want to say about Bridgerton is that Anthony and Simon hooked up at Oxford.
Lauren: If you followed the live tweet on the Reclaiming Jane Twitter account, Emily is very adamant about this.
Emily: It happened. It's factual. You cannot tell me from their interactions and the way they speak to each other in that club.
Like, I'm sorry. Those two men had a very tender sexual relationship.
Lauren: No, there there's. I fully expect if I were to log onto AO3 right this moment and look up Bridgerton fanfiction, of which there has to be a good amount by now, I believe in you, fan fiction writers of the world. There's got, there's got to be at least one.
Outro
[music begins]
Emily: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters 16 through 20 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of class.
Lauren: Check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, for show notes, transcripts and links to all of our social media.
Emily: If you'd like to support us and help us create more content, you can join our Patreon, @Reclaiming Jane, or just leave us a review on iTunes.
Reclaiming Jane is produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. Our music is by LaTasha Bundy and our show art is by Emily Davis-Hale.
Lauren: We'll see you next time.
[music ends]
Emily: There. Okay. There are two things that did really bug me.
Lauren: Okay.
Emily: One was the stays, because --
Lauren: Oh, you mentioned that --
Emily: nobody wore a [00:46:00] freaking chemise under their stays.
Yes. You're going to have horrible chafing from this fitted garment, right against your skin. That's why they wore shifts. You put something underneath it, but also those stays wouldn't let you tight lace. Tight lace wasn't a thing. Stop tight lacing in your period pieces.
Lauren: I think they just want to get across -- use the visual language of "corsets are really tight," but I --
Emily: But those weren't!
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. It's actually physically impossible to tight lace in the kind of stays that they were using. Also, if you are trying to tighten a corset, if you're trying to tight lace, pulling directly back doesn't. Work. It does not function like that. It will do nothing.
It'll just pull you backwards. Trust me. I have tightened corsets. I know how it works.
Lauren: This is the hill that Emily will die on, everyone.
Emily: This is the hill I will die on! Sorry, Bridgerton. You're really fun. But the stays, I can't, I cannot, plus we know what the Regency silhouette is. You can't see waists.
Lauren: They're non-existent.
Emily: It does not matter. It's completely irrelevant to the way that you will look. I, I can't. Anyway, I've died on this hill now. We can resurrect me for another topic.
