Sense and Sensibility 16-20: “Keep It Classy”
In Episode 4, Emily and Lauren dive in to chapters 16-20 and discuss what defines social class, then and now. Also included: what people value, how to identify a gentleman, and why Marianne deserves a good "bless her heart."
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Anchor | Breaker | Castbox | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Radio Public
Don’t see the latest episode on your platform of choice? Click play above!
Show Notes
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Keep it classy, Janeites. Or, you know, behave in a way that makes you happy and isn’t dictated by class. We’re not the bosses of you.
We had a great time discussing all the different places that class made an appearance in this section — we had a ton of scenes to choose from. Jane Austen does such a great job of subtly critiquing class in all of her novels, so we were barely able to scratch the surface of the theme in this episode. Where did you see class in these chapters? Did we skip over something you really love? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook!
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Episode 4 | Sense and Sensibility 16-20: “Keep It Classy”
Introduction
[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 16 through 20 of Sense and Sensibility with the topic of class to guide our conversation. [theme music plays out]
Welcome back to Reclaiming Jane.
Lauren: Welcome back for our fourth episode. We're excited that you've decided to join us again. And we're also very excited because unlike our previous episode, where we really didn't see the theme at all in the pages, the theme of class showed up everywhere.
Emily: Everywhere. I was using a purple highlighter this time. And like, I swear, half the lines in this section are purple now.
Lauren: I've marked up so many of the margins of my book, just adding different comments or underlining the multiple pieces of dialogue that related to what we had to talk about today because in some cases there are characters who go on complete monologues that all have something to do with class.
And there's so much that we can dig into that I worry that we won't even be able to get to all of it in a reasonable amount of time.
Emily: Oh. With -- between that and the amount of notes that I have for the history section this time, we're definitely not going to hit all of it, but you know, lean into that marginalia. You can go back to it later.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: I'm a big fan of marginalia in general.
Lauren: I also -- that's been one of the joys about going back and reading this book again is because I'm using the same set of books that I used for the seminar I took in 2013. I can see what I wrote when I was 20 versus the notes that I make now.
And I used to be somebody who was really against writing in books. I was very much in the camp of you don't write in books, you don't dog-ear pages, you leave them pristine. But now I have changed my mind completely. I think going to school for literature changed that because I took so many notes in the pages of my books and being able to go back and see what struck me the first time I read it, versus what stands out to me [00:02:00] now, whether it's just for personal reasons or for podcast reasons is really fun.
Emily: Yeah. I really love -- one of my favorite books is One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Lauren: Yes.
Emily: Which I first read in high school. And so of course we were all making notes in our books, in that class.
And then I went back and read it a few years ago. And like, well, now most of the highlighting has faded, but I still have all of my notes. I swear, by the end of that section of the class, I had either a dog-ear or a post-it on every single page of that book. There is highlighting in multiple colors. I've got so many notes.
I also was a big fan in high school of using very colorful pens for all kinds of different things, which -- Lauren is just nodding sagely at me --
Lauren: Knowing you how I do, I'm not surprised at all.
Emily: Yeah, yeah.
30-Second Recaps
Lauren: All right. Shall we go ahead and dive into those 30-second recaps?
Emily: Yeah, let's, let's get going.
Lauren: Whose turn is it to go first?
Emily: Mine.
Lauren: It's your turn. Oh, wonderful. Okay, good. Are you as ready as you will ever be for the 30-second recap?
Emily: At this point, there's no saving me. So yeah.
Lauren: That's so dramatic. All right. On your mark. Get set. Go!
Emily: Willoughby has gone. Marianne is very sad, but then Edward Ferrers -- Farrars -- however you pronounce it -- comes to visit and everybody's happy to see him, including Elinor, but Marianne is still mad that they don't seem to be, like, head over heels for each other.
Then he leaves. And then Mrs. Jennings' other daughter and her husband come to visit and it's chaos. It's just complete chaos.
Lauren: All right, well done. Under 30 seconds.
Emily: Nice. I'm sure I missed something crucial, but whatever.
Lauren: It's 30 seconds. You can't sum up -- how many pages is this? In 30 seconds?
Emily: We'll talk about more. We'll get it later.
Lauren: It'll be [00:04:00] fine.
Emily: All right. On your mark. Get set. Go.
Lauren: All right. Marianne is still upset. She goes through a very Legally Blonde montage of the breakup scene, where she thinks of everything that reminds her of Willoughby. And she's just upset and brooding. Edward shows up, who Elinor has a thing for, and they're all very happy, but Edward is a little cagey and doesn't really talk about what's going on.
Also, there's a lock of hair in his ring that Elinor thinks is hers, but she's not 100% sure. Mrs. Jennings' daughter comes, it's chaos central. I don't know what's going on with that family. And they have a very chaotic dinner party.
Emily: All right. Also under 30 seconds.
Lauren: Yes. Made it.
Discussion of Sense and Sensibility 16-20
Emily: Let's talk about how cagey Edward was being.
Lauren: Extremely.
Emily: That was weird. Like, he shows up completely unannounced. They have no expectation of seeing him.
Lauren: Nope.
Emily: He just appears, stays for only a week and insists that he cannot stay any longer, even though he has literally nowhere else to be. By his own admission. He's like, well, I have to go either to London or back to Norland, but he doesn't want to go back to Norland because -- probably because Fanny's there, and this is the Fanny Dashwood hate club.
Lauren: It is. Always. Both the narrator and Elinor are very deadpan and shady about this. Elinor is also just deadpan and shady throughout this entire section.
Emily: I relate so much to Elinor --
Lauren: And I loved it. But he says, I don't actually have anywhere I need to be, but I can't stay here. Not as a direct quote, but in those, in that many words basically gives himself up by saying, well, I don't actually have to do anything.
But also, I, I'm not going to stay here, so I'm just going to go, even though I have no valid excuse to leave and I won't let you convince me to stay here where I clearly enjoy your company, but also won't tell you everything that's going on.
Emily: Yeah. And it seems like maybe something has happened to upset him in recent days because the Dashwoods and the narrator make note that he's very much not himself. He's not in spirits during this visit. And the [00:06:00] longer he stays, the better he seems to be, but still never quite up to whatever their threshold was for knowing him before.
Lauren: And, but apparently like Elinor, he was very much somebody who played his emotions close to the chest.
So it's even more striking that he's being cagey because he and Elinor are already very reserved people. And then for him to be even more questionable about his whereabouts and what he's doing with his life is super suspicious.
Class in Sense and Sensibility 16-20
Emily: Although some of his lack of determination, I guess, actually does tie in directly to our theme for this week, which is class.
So they start talking about basically, what — what's he going to do with his life? And there are several different layers of class influence that I saw here. First off is the discussion of his mother. She apparently seems to have the power to determine what he's going to do and when he gets his inheritance or whatever.
In addition to that, though, he seems to have any number of potential paths to follow. He was enrolled at Oxford University when he was 18. So presumably he has some university education?
Lauren: And it is implied that he finished at Oxford and then after that did not feel like choosing an occupation, in part because the occupation he wanted to choose, his family decided wasn't genteel enough.
Emily: Because of this university education, it seems like Edward really could have his pick of professions, but being a clergyman is not prestigious enough for his family. It seems he is too old to enter the military.
Apparently.
Lauren: I think by the time he finished at Oxford, he was too old. So had he not gone to Oxford, he could have entered the military. And then by the time [00:08:00] he finished, it was no longer as viable of an option as it happened before. Regardless, he has his pick of professions, unlike people from a lower class. And he also can choose to just do nothing, which is what he's doing right now. And that doesn't have any effect on his wealth or his wellbeing.
Emily: Yeah. It doesn't seem like doing nothing is off the table either because he is a member of the gentry. They -- his family seems to be pretty well off. So he really could just live on the income from their estates, which, reminder, is income generated by people who are renting their land and working their fields or whatever they have.
Lauren: I don't know why they insist on him having some kind of occupation.
Emily: Maybe it's just a family thing that his mother wants him to have something to do with himself.
Lauren: Maybe it's Maybelline. You know, who knows. And that also when Edward is talking about professions and they're talking about wealth, one of the other conversations that they have between Elinor, Marianne and Edward is about what amount of money you would need to live comfortably.
And Marianne is meant to sound ridiculous in this passage because she goes, Oh, I would think, you know, 1000, 1800, 2000 pounds per year. That's really all you need to live comfortably. I should think that that is comfort. And Elinor said, you think that's comfortable? I think that's wealth. Why would you think that that's all you need to live comfortably? Which is especially hilarious because the Dashwoods were living on 500 pounds per year and clearly they're fine.
And Marianne is saying, Oh, well, you know, 1800, 2000 pounds. I think that's what a family should shoot for to live comfortably. And Elinor calls her out on that and says that, no, I think you're dreaming a little big there.
Emily: Yeah. Marianne actually says, "2000 a year is a very moderate income,"
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: "...a family cannot be maintained on a smaller, I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two and hunters cannot be supported on less." Like, that's living comfortably?
Okay.
Lauren: A family [00:10:00] cannot be supported unless, but your family of servants surely is. So that contradicts your sentence right there. The servants that you claim you need to have in order to live comfortably.
I looked up just for context, how much those same servants would have been making, since she says a family can't be maintained on less than 1800 pounds per year. I felt like you, I was like, I'm going to do some historical research. But so, the male servants who she employs were probably earning 20 pounds to 60 pounds per year, depending on what their role was and what their job was.
And women on the other hand were making anywhere from five pounds to 15 pounds per year. And room and board were included in that if you're the type of servant who's working in a house. So they weren't expected to use that income to pay rent, but still, 15 pounds per year versus 1800 to 2000.
Emily: Wow.
And I don't think we're meant to assume that the Dashwoods are on the higher end of the gentry.
Lauren: Absolutely not. No.
Emily: They're, they're not the uber-wealthy. I mean, and yeah, to some extent, this is Marianne being kind of frivolous and just really not understanding what the requirements are to maintain a home and a family.
But wow.
Lauren: Yeah, it, the difference was astronomical and their brother was one of the wealthy people, cause I think he has something like 6,000 pounds a year. Or something along those lines, which is why he could have very easily afforded to help them out. And Fanny continues to tell him no and convinced him that they can't, even though they very clearly could, but the Dashwoods on the other hand, they have but a ‘measly' 500 pounds, which still makes their servants’ pay pale in comparison.
Classy Behavior
Emily: Going off of what Marianne had said about basically how these books and music are absolutely essential. Let's talk about the behaviors that define class, because whenever Sir John and Mrs. Jennings walk into a room, the differences are on full display.
Lauren: I'm excited. Let's talk about it.
[00:12:00] Emily: So around this time, because the Industrial Revolution is in its early stages and the middle class is beginning to expand, there's not necessarily social mobility between the more rigid ranks of English society, but people start to depend more on the behavior and the manner of others to judge whether they're of good quality, basically. So at this point, it's just kind of beginning to slide from gentlemanliness being purely a product of birth toward gentlemanliness being a product of your behaviors.
Lauren: Good breeding.
Emily: Exactly.
There's a difference between high birth and good breeding. And this section just goes all in on the good breeding aspect of that, with Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, as usual, being their uncouth selves and Lady Middleton presumably shaking her head over everything they do because they're, they're outgoing and a little overbearing and not reserved and unfailingly polite like she would prefer them to be.
Oh, okay. This is one thing for Edward that I specifically highlighted. That he says, "I have frequently thought that I must have been intended by nature to be fond of low company. I am so little at my ease among strangers of gentility."
Lauren: I'm glad you marked that because I had also marked it and I'd completely forgotten about it until now.
Emily: I wish that we had, you know, the, the time and space to dive into all the different layers of that. Because he would have grown up in the gentry, but what is it about strangers of gentility that he finds unfamiliar?
Lauren: I wonder if it's less that he finds gentility [00:14:00] unfamiliar and more that there are certain expectations of him that he knows that they'll have, and he worries that he won't be able to live up to those expectations.
On the other hand, if he's with somebody of quote unquote, low birth. He's already a step above them just by virtue of his own station in society. And if there's any mistake or misstep in his manners, they'll be less likely to pick up on it or less likely to care. And so he doesn't have to be as cognizant all the time of his own behavior.
Emily: He's got nothing to prove.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: Among people of lower status.
Lauren: Yeah. He's already proven himself just by virtue, just by virtue of being born in a higher class than they have. But in gentility, is constantly having to prove himself with his manners because now his birth isn't enough anymore.
He should've stayed around to hang out with Sir John and Mrs. Jennings more because he would have seen, he clearly has nothing to prove around them. Cause they have no manners at all.
Emily: Yeah.
And apparently they are not alone. When Mrs. Jennings' other daughter, Charlotte, comes to visit -- Mrs. Palmer and her husband, Mr. Palmer -- who are...
Lauren: Both of them have atrocious manners.
Emily: They're complete opposites, but they both have the worst manners. So Charlotte is like Mrs. Jennings cranked up to 11 somehow. And Mr. Palmer is just, he gives off the impression of trying to act higher class than he is. So he's super judgmental of everybody's manners and is really quiet and cold.
Lauren: So for example, when they first meet Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, they've invited themselves over to the Dashwoods’ home unannounced. They do not pick up on the social cues that you want to get away and you want them to stop talking. Whereas Mr. Palmer comes into the house and sits down and picks up a newspaper and continues to ignore everyone. And then when someone asks him a pointed question like, "Oh, is there any news in the paper?" Trying to draw him into conversation, he says, "no," and goes back to reading the paper.
Emily: Which is such a power move. Honestly.
[00:16:00] Lauren: “There's nothing in here that I'm reading. No, there's no news. But I will continue to read it rather than speak to you.”
Yeah, both this initial meeting with Mrs. Palmer and then the eventual dinner party in the following chapter, because Sir John invites him over for dinner the following day, which Elinor and Marianne once he arrives, both tried to get out of, but he doesn't take no for an answer, which is another example of the lack of good manners because there should be the polite little dance that you do with your words where it's, "Oh, I'd like you to come over."
"Oh, no, I couldn't." "No, really. I'd like you to come." "No, I couldn't impose."
And then you just kind of let it go, but he doesn't let it go. He doesn't pick up on the social cues that, where he can give them a graceful bow out of the invitation and still have been polite by inviting them over.
He just steamrolls and insists that they come.
Emily: Mrs. Palmer does exactly the same thing, but even worse, because she says, "We shall meet again in town very soon, I hope." And Elinor and Marianne, you know, just trying to defer that, say actually, we're not going to be in town, making their excuses.
And then Mrs. Palmer in literally the next paragraph says, "I shall be quite disappointed if you do not, I could get the nicest house in the world for you next door to ours in Hanover Square, you must come indeed," and just decides, no, you're going to come. I'm going to find you a house, not thinking for a millisecond, what kind of position that might put them in.
Not just in having to turn down this offer, but if they did accept it, which I highly doubt they will, what kind of, you know, debt would they be into her? Even if she says, Oh, no, you don't owe me anything. Blah, blah, blah. The Dashwoods seemed to be the kind of people where if someone did a favor like that, for them, they would feel themselves in their debt until they could explicitly clear that somehow.
Lauren: It's another manners thing. Right?
[00:18:00] Emily: Exactly.
Lauren: That's just not done. And the interesting thing about Mrs. Palmer too, is that she seems to be incredibly focused on making everyone think that she's so nice and so agreeable and so happy. But she doesn't seem to realize that she's over the top all the time, probably because of who her mother is.
So she doesn't really have a good example of what over the top is or where the line is. And so she doesn't have that kind of gauge, but she doesn't come off as a pleasant person to be around, which is what she's trying to be. She's trying to make everyone like her, but what she is is insufferable and she's in your face all the time.
It's like weaponized happiness.
Emily: I could barely stand reading all the things that she said. I can't even imagine being in the same room.
Wealth & Jane Austen
Lauren: Yeah. It's a very "look at me" type of attitude. But I think that also ties into the theme today, as well as that.... I think people have the misconception that Jane Austen writes romance novels where the object is to get the rich man.
I think if you haven't read Jane Austen, or if you've just kind of heard what people's opinions are of her, that's the impression that you come away with, but she's actually really critical of wealth. Across almost all of her books and her books, aren't romances in the sense that we think of today, they're very pragmatic in the way they think about things.
And I think this section shows so clearly the work that Jane Austen does to kind of poke holes in the idea that money automatically makes you a better person or a smarter person or a more well-mannered person because all of the characters --
Emily: -- or a happier person,
Lauren: -- or a happier person, because all the characters in the section that have money are either poorly mannered or they're miserable or are just not pleasant people to be around or just not good people. Jane Austen isn't an author who was upholding wealth, she was poking holes at it all the time.
Emily: Even Edward, who is a pretty well-mannered person in general, seems because of his wealth to just not [00:20:00] understand what it would be to have a purpose in life, because he has all of these options open to him.
But like, he just, he doesn't feel like doing any of them. I mean, I feel like we're going to talk about privilege in every single episode of this podcast, but it's very much a privilege of class.
Lauren: Absolutely. And I think you see that today in, like, the children whose parents built a lot of wealth who then have none of the same drive that their parents do.
I mean, so often that it's become a trope in shows like Succession or Billions or things like that, where you have the patriarch of the family who's built like this billion-dollar company and then his good for nothing kids who just want to leech off of the family money because wealth gives you the option to do nothing or to do everything.
It's very easy to just do nothing.
Emily: I mean, I can't say if, if I became enormously wealthy today, I can't say that I wouldn't do nothing.
Lauren: I think there's a difference between it. So I think your definition of nothing is you would do what you want to do. So you'll be able to dedicate more time to your hobbies, but you have hobbies, and you have things that you like and that you enjoy and that you would spend your time doing.
And then there's nothing that is wasting money for the sake of wasting money, because you truly have nothing else to do.
Emily: Yeah. And my roommate and I talk about that all the time, how we just, we want to be stupidly rich so that we can do nice things for our friends. And that really is, I think the... the perspective shift when you come from money versus when you don't come from money. It's just an interesting, the way that your class positioning influences what you learn about value, the value of things, or the value of experiences or the value of a person's life.
Honestly.
Wealth Obsessions
Lauren: Yeah, that actually, so that does tie into the pop culture connection that I was [00:22:00] thinking of actually. So one of the things that this chapter and the theme reminded me of was the obsession that our culture has with wealth, even. So even as we're having more conversations about what does excessive wealth mean?
What does that look like? When do we impose more regulations so that people can't just accumulate massive amounts of wealth and we're able to redistribute that so that the society's equitable for everybody? Like, as we continue to have those conversations, it's still evident in what we consume, how obsessed we are with wealth and with the trappings of wealth.
And if you look at like the early 2000s, we had shows like “MTV Cribs,” where it was just celebrities showing off their massive mega-mansions. If you fast forward to today, there's a show that's, "Selling Mega-Mansions" on the Awe channel, which is literally just a channel about looking at wealth. The things you find out when you look at your parents' DirectTV, because I don't have cable. So I wouldn't know.
But in TV shows, in movies, that's something that we're told we should aspire to. And even in changes from book to movie. So we have the movie Crazy Rich Asians that came out a couple of years ago that's based on the book by Kevin Kwan. And there's a change in how wealth is talked about and shown in the movie versus the book.
So in the movie, it's this very awe-inspiring thing. It's a world that we should want to join and to enter, it's, "this is their glossy world and don't you wish that you could be part of it?" But that's not the message of the book at all. The book is critiquing wealth and excessive wealth. And at the end, spoiler alert, the main characters turn away from it rather than say, "finally, we've been accepted by this upper echelon of people," which is the message that the movie sends you.
And then when I read the book, I was really shocked to see what the difference was because they were two completely different core messages. And I think that's one of the functions of Hollywood and the on-screen entertainment industry is to continue upholding this myth that we can have it all, and we [00:24:00] too can be like these people, because the system is not set up like that.
But because we're taught to value this and to aspire to this, we're a lot less likely to pass things like the federal minimum wage that actually makes it possible for people to live better lives because... I've heard it described before that people in America think that they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
That they think that one day that's going to be them. So they won't pass policies that will help them right now, people who are making $10 an hour, they'll pass policies that will make who they think they're going to be in the future, but harm themselves in turn, because you're not, you're not going to get there.
It's a one in a million chance and it's going to be a hell of a lot more likely if you're white and male. And if you don't have any kind of recognizable accent, so people can't place where you came from. It's just, it's not happening, but we just have such a fascination with and reverence for wealth in American society specifically.
That I think it shapes what we're able to be as a country, if what we are most obsessed with is wealth. Because unless we shift that, I think there's very little that we can do.
Emily: I think it's almost fetishization of wealth, especially when it comes to these visual representations, the TV shows, the movies, it's conspicuous consumption in the biggest way we've ever seen in history, really?
Because even if there were massively wealthy people, you know, in the Regency period who lived in palaces, you certainly weren't sitting in your tiny apartment on a broken-down couch watching on TV as they gave you a closet tour.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: And I think it also goes back to what we said, I think in the first episode, about access, because today we get a much clearer picture.
We explicitly know what wealth can [00:26:00] achieve because it's all over the place because we're given these very concrete ideals to live up to in terms of wealth, whereas someone of the lower classes in the past would certainly be aware of those kinds of disparities, but would probably see much less of the day to day privileges that wealthy people were afforded.
Lauren: Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, if you were a servant in a wealthy home in the Regency period, you knew exactly what was there.
Emily: Oh, absolutely.
Lauren: But otherwise there wasn't really a way for you to come into contact with that because there were such separate social spheres. Whereas now it's not just Hollywood and television, it's Instagram and it's social media where it's in your face all the time.
Emily: And it's YouTube with clickbaity titles. Like I bought a $200,000 purse, except that it's actually a $200,000 purse.
Lauren: There is a whole account called Rich Kids of Instagram, just aggregates posts from teenagers who have grown up in excessive wealth who go on lavish vacations to Dubai or to Paris or whatever.
And because people have this kind of voyeuristic need to look at what wealth is --
Emily: Voyeurism, that's what it is.
Lauren: Yeah. They rack up massive numbers of followers because everybody wants to see what it's like to live on the other side. It's how the other half lives, except for on Instagram all the time. I dunno. I think it's just weird to see how we have this obsession with wealth, even as critiques of wealth, they're given a bigger platform.
It hasn't yet crossed over into like mainstream pop culture yet. Like I'm noticing more dissenting voices now. It hasn't yet made a dent in the centuries-long, like, fetishization and voyeuristic look at wealth that we have.
Emily: And even in media where, you know, the super-wealthy person has to go and work a regular job or something like "Undercover Boss" or whatever, the, I guess, moral at the end of that [00:28:00] is always, Oh, they've learned how to, you know, see the humanity be in these poor people.
And it's never, no person should have to go through that. No one should have to work three jobs and still be on food stamps to feed their family. We've become so obsessed with wealth and aspiring to that wealth that we've just completely lost sight of what we can reasonably expect any person to do to survive.
And so there are people at the very bottom of the ladder who have literally nothing. And yet somehow the popular narrative still has not come around to, “no one should have to live like that because they're people and they deserve the basic dignity of food and shelter.”
Lauren: I would be interested to see what -- I should have looked this up ahead of time -- but what the wealth gap was in the Regency period and what the wealth gap is now.
Because I feel like people think we've closed it. And I, I feel, I feel like I'm back in a classroom every time I say, "well, I would push back against that" because it just feels very' liberal arts' to me, but I really would. I don't think, I think it's gotten worse. I don't think it's gotten better.
Emily: I definitely think it's gotten worse. Absolutely.
Lauren: Yeah. I think that I am right, [Ed. Note — she wasn’t] but I need more stats to back it up and I don't have them and it's annoying me.
[Editor’s Note: Historians vary on if the wealth gap has gotten worse or better, depending on the research methods used. However, when comparing Britain then to the U.S. now, the wealth gap has gotten better. In Regency England, the top one percent owned 55% of the national wealth, in the U.S. today the top one percent of households own around 30% of the national wealth.]
Emily: Yeah. Well, without the statistics on hand, I can say that I think technology has enabled this just gross accumulation of wealth because it gives a single person like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, the ability to oversee a huge workforce of people that just would not have been at all possible in any period of history before now.
You couldn't have a business with a million employees, because how the hell would you administrate that? It would be absolutely [00:30:00] impossible. And the Industrial Revolution contributed to this as well because factories and mass-manufacturing became a thing.
And then it just rolls right on up to now. Where, you know, we're convinced that someone who flips burgers doesn't deserve to be able to pay rent.
In Which Lauren & Emily Get Too Dark
Lauren: Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned the industrial revolution and Elon Musk because his father owned a jewel mine, I don't remember if it was either diamonds or emeralds, but —
Emily: I think it was emerald.
Lauren: I think it was emerald. So his father built his wealth off of exploiting the labor of people of color. And then his son has continued.
Emily: In South Africa.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: There's that photo that's been going around in the last few days of, Oh, this here's a picture of Elon Musk in 1995 fixing his own car cause he couldn't afford to. No, his father was a South African emerald mine owner during apartheid.
Lauren: No one wants to talk about how he got that money.
Emily: Off the backs of slaves essentially.
Lauren: Pretty much. Yeah.
Emily: Yeah, that's, that's another thing that we like to pretend doesn't exist anymore. There's no such thing as slavery anymore.
Lauren: Don't think about who made your Nike shoes or your $10 shirt that you got from a fast-fashion place.
Wonder why it's ten bucks.
Emily: At some point, I will launch into my massive rant about fast fashion and devaluing the fashion industry. But, uh, I think today is not that day.
Final Takeaways
Lauren: One of the last things that I wanted to call attention to was when Elinor and Marianne are having their conversation about wealth and what kind of money you need to be comfortable.
And what is necessary for life. Marianne is again, being very flighty and showing the privilege that she has because of her class, even though they're kind of lower gentility than some of the other people who they might have in their social circle. And says, oh, you know, what do wealth or grandeur have to do with happiness?
And Elinor points out, you know, grandiosity has very little to do with happiness, but money has everything to do with it because it determines, can you feed yourself, you know, can you put [00:32:00] a roof over your head? And she basically makes the point, once you have all of your necessities covered anything more, isn't really going to make you happy.
But money does play a part in your happiness because it determines whether or not you can survive and is the more pragmatic end of that argument. And I think that is a debate and a conversation that we're still having today, that money doesn't buy happiness. And I think that is very easy to say, if you've never wanted for money.
And if you come from a situation like I did, where you never had to worry about money. And so you aren't aware of how privileged that sounds to say money doesn't buy you happiness, because if you are not able to pay your rent and then suddenly a thousand dollars drop from the sky, that thousand dollars is going to make you very happy.
Emily: Yeah, I'm — there have been studies done in recent years about the correlation between mental health and financial resources and that money can't buy happiness, only plateaus once all of your basic needs are accounted for below that any little bit of money that you accumulate improves your mental health.
Lauren: Yeah. I think that that point from Elinor, I feel like is the main thesis of this section, so to speak, is that grandiosity has very little to do with happiness. Money can't buy you class and class certainly doesn't make you a better, happier or more moral person.
Emily: Yeah, definitely. I think it comes down to money can't buy happiness, but money can buy stability and stability makes it possible for you to be happy.
Lauren: Definitely. And that was something that Jane Austen, herself, was very aware of as well, as someone who was unmarried her entire life. And, similar to most of the characters who she writes about, was very aware of women's place in society and how tenuous it was if you were unmarried [00:34:00] and had very limited avenues of making your own money, even as somebody who was, you know, in the gentility and had more privileges than people of a lower class, was very aware and very cognizant of just how important money was to the wellbeing of women, especially, and how it directed what they could and couldn't do with their lives and what they could expect to experience and achieve.
Emily: Would you say that's your final takeaway then?
Lauren: Yeah, I think that would be my final takeaway.
Emily: My final takeaway, I think, is that being a member of a certain class won't do all the work for you. It's still up to you as an individual to find some purpose in your life, to be a good person, to behave the way you want to be perceived. And just being of a higher status does not inherently make you better.
Lauren: I think that sums it up quite nicely.
Emily: Thank you.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters 21 through 25 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of morality.
Lauren: Check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com for show notes, transcripts and links to our social media.
Emily: If you'd like to support us and help us create more content, you can join our Patreon, @ReclaimingJanePod, 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.
Emily: So I feel like this isn't going to come up naturally later. So I do want to say, I [00:36:00] love the detail of the hair ring because hair jewelry was super popular during the Georgian and Victorian periods.
Y'all. Google Georgian hair jewelry. It is stunning. And if people wouldn't give me weird, weird looks for it now I would absolutely have some kind of hair jewelry.
Lauren: So why was hair jewelry popular? Do you know?
Emily: I think just because it was sort of a token of intimacy, like a remembrance thing. So a lot of people would incorporate a loved one's hair into like, mourning jewelry and stuff like that.
But it was also definitely like a token between lovers.
Lauren: That makes sense.
