Sense and Sensibility 31-35: “Everybody Hurts”
In Episode 7, Emily and Lauren tackle some heavy topics when considering a trauma-informed reading of Jane Austen. Also included: backstory, sympathy, and hysteria.
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Show Notes
So…bit of a heavy theme this episode. We do want to provide a quick disclaimer that neither of us is a mental health professional and none of this is intended to be psychological advice — please listen to your actual therapists! (Or go to therapy if you feel like it would be helpful to you!)
Overall, we hope that this episode helps people to remember to have a little empathy and patience with people. We’re all just doing our best trying to navigate this whole life thing. Also, can someone please reach into the fictional past and get Colonel Brandon a therapist?!
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Episode 7 | Sense and Sensibility 31-35: “Everybody Hurts”
[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 31 through 35 of Sense and Sensibility with the topic of trauma to guide our conversation.
Lauren: So chapters 31 through 35. We had a quiet section before, and then these five chapters, it feels like Jane Austen said, if you were looking for drama, here you go. Served up on a silver platter.
Emily: Yeah. This definitely feels like a... The climactic point of the book, at least to me, who again has never read Sense and Sensibility before. So.
Lauren: All of this is new to you.
Emily: As I'm reading this, I'm, I'm thinking back to like, comments that Lauren has made during previous recording sessions. I'm like, Oh my God, she knew what was coming!
Lauren: I have been trying very, very hard not to accidentally give any spoilers. I'm like, “I know nothing. I will say nothing. I will keep this pristine.”
Thirty-Second Recaps
So I'm, I'm really, really interested to hear what your reactions are going to be for this episode. Oh gosh. There's just so much that came together in these five chapters and I'm, I'm actually a little bit worried about how we're going to fit all of it into a 30-second recap because usually it's, there's a good, like, overarching plot thread that we can latch on to, to kind of use, to bring us through some semblance of a coherent 30 seconds.
And this time I feel like we're both going to just be cramming so much information, and then we're going to lose a good amount of detail. So thank God we have extra time to just expand on that afterward.
Emily: Yeah. This is going to be a challenge for sure.
Lauren: Yeah, this is a good time to emphasize that you hear our first take for these 30-second recaps.
[00:02:00] So what you hear is what we originally say. We don't record these twice. It's just the original attempt.
Emily: Yeah, I don't, I don't even take, I don't take anything out of the recaps in editing either. I leave exactly the 30 seconds that we have.
Lauren: So we have to be very careful.
Emily: Yeah. All right. So with everything that's happened in these chapters, let's begin the work of contextualizing our reactions by giving our 30-second recaps.
Lauren: I appreciate that ‘begin’ because we certainly won't be able to fit it into 30 seconds.
Emily: Certainly not.
Lauren: And I'm really going to try. I think I mentioned last time that I probably speak too quickly. But I feel like that will be to my benefit this time around.
Emily: Let ‘er rip.
Lauren: It's not going to be good when I have to transcribe it later. But for now for trying to fit into 30 seconds, it will do me a world of good.
Emily: All right. Are you ready?
Lauren: Oh, yes.
Emily: On your mark. Get set. Go.
Lauren: Okay. So Colonel Brandon comes with the absolute bombshell that his supposed love child is actually his niece from his former lover who then became a sister-in-law, that was a whole mess.
His niece ran off with Willoughby when he was supposed to be going with them to the party thing. Willoughby got her pregnant, has a secret love child. And Elinor tells all this to Marianne. Marianne is still sad. The Steeles come, the Dashwoods come. They're all awful to Elinor. They have a really awful party.
Everybody sucks. And then Marianne and Edward and Elinor and Lucy have an awkward conversation.
Oh, there's so much. How do you put it in 30 seconds? Oh, that was, that was my best attempt.
All right, Emily, are you ready? We've got a lot of plot details to sum up in 30 seconds. Are you up to the task?
Emily: We're about to find out. I'm trying to be a little more optimistic because I — I've been a complete downer about my ability to sum this up --
Lauren: and each time you pretty much get it. So --
Emily: “Pretty much.” Thanks.
[laughter]
Lauren: That wasn’t meant to be shady!
[00:04:00] Lauren: Are you ready? And… go!
Emily: Willoughby is getting married. Marianne is depressed. Colonel Brandon shows up and tells Elinor the true story of his niece who got pregnant by Willoughby. And then everybody else is there. The Steeles love Edward's mother. And there's just a lot of socialization and Marianne is very upset the whole time.
And I still have four seconds and I have nothing else left to say.
Lauren: There you go.
Emily: That may be the most chaotic set of recaps we've had to date.
Lauren: Yeah, perhaps, but I also feel like. If there's ever the question like, “Oh, what roles do you fall into?” I feel like I'm always the chaos side and you're the calm side, like keeping us on track so that--
Emily: That's not how I ever feel. I always feel like I'm chaotic and you're you have a level head.
Lauren: Oh, good. That means we balanced each other out without even realizing. Yeah, because I always feel like the chaos host from just like, “Oh, thank God Emily's here because I would just go off the rails 100%.”
Emily: We both have our parts to play, whatever they may be.
Lauren: We don't know what they are, but we're playing them well.
Emily: Evidently.
Initial Reactions
Lauren: Okay. So will you start us off with just talking about your general reactions to this section?
Emily: They were many. Yeah, so I had many reactions. Wow. I was not expecting the Willoughby backstory to be so skeevy.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: I have even more sympathy for Colonel Brandon than I did before. I like Lucy Steele even less. And my appreciation for Mrs. Jennings is also growing.
Lauren: Agreed. The one scene that we have with Mrs. [00:06:00] Jennings and Marianne specifically, she accidentally upsets Marianne, but I feel like. She is the type of person who you would want to have around you in a breakup, because she strikes me as the type of person who, regardless of her feelings for your past partner or love interest or whatever would immediately change tack and be like, “They were awful anyway, how could they do that to you?”
And just like, be that railing against the former person that you need when you're like in the throes of pain and heartbreak like, “Yeah. They are awful. Yeah, I never loved them anyway. Yeah, it's fine.”
Emily: Yeah. And in this particular case, so what has happened is that, of course, Marianne is in the throes of grief about Willoughby, basically breaking up with her.
And so Mrs. Jennings comes and says, “Oh, here, I have something that'll cheer you up. Here's a letter from your mother.” It's not Mrs. Jennings' fault at all that the letter Mrs. Dashwood has sent is very badly timed and is essentially praising Willoughby. And she's still completely convinced that Marianne and Willoughby must be secretly engaged because she does not have the latest information.
So Mrs. Jennings is doing her best. She's really tried to support this poor girl in her home. Who's going through it.
Lauren: Mmm.
Emily: She just happened to bring a letter that did not help the situation.
Lauren: Marianne was also hoping in her mind that it would be from Willoughby and he would come to make everything right and apologize.
But the first sin is that the letter is not from Willoughby. And the second thing is that her mother is just. Extolling about Willoughby's virtues in part because Elinor had written to her, like, can you help me try and figure out if Marianne and Willoughby are actually engaged? And because communication doesn't move that quickly, the letter that Elinor had solicited is just now reaching Marianne, unfortunately with terrible timing for what's actually going on in her life.
Emily: Just honestly tragic timing.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: But. Following this, of course the [00:08:00] news spreads that Willoughby is getting married to someone else and everybody in their immediate circle is ready to jump in and just give him shit about him treating Marianne so badly.
So then Colonel Brandon arrives, and not only brings some new information about Willoughby. But also uncovers the truth behind the mystery of why he had left Barton Park so suddenly all those months before.
Lauren: Yeah. So not only does he have information about Willoughby, but he can also tell Elinor a little bit more about why it was that he left and give some, throw some water on the idea or the rumor that he has a secret love child that he's been hiding from everyone.
So he had mentioned to Elinor chapters back that Marianne reminded him of a woman who he had known in the past. And it's very heavily implied that this was somebody who he had been in love with before, but we don't know who she is or what happened to her.
Emily: So this young woman who has grown up in the same home as Colonel Brandon and his brother, who is the ward of their father, evidently has significant financial means. And so the father decides she's going to marry the eldest son. And so they're forcibly married, basically.
Lauren: Unhappily.
Emily: Very unhappily and most of the discontent seems to be on the part of Eliza. Colonel Brandon reveals that within a couple of years of their marriage, Eliza is divorced from his brother.
Lauren: Which is super scandalous for the 19th century, like who got divorced?
Emily: Yeah. And apparently, she essentially became, you know, a fallen woman. She had several different affairs with various men. Apparently [00:10:00] the first of these affairs resulted in a child out of wedlock, who is the mysterious Miss Williams. So it turns out that when Colonel Brandon returned from his post in the Indies and went to find his former sister-in-law, she was dying of tuberculosis and entrusted the care of her young daughter to him, which she seems to have taken very seriously. He provided for her education. When she left school, he placed her with a woman who was caring for or overseeing several other young girls as well. And then a few months before the Dashwoods arrived at Barton, Miss Williams had disappeared.
Lauren: Yeah, she went on a trip to Bath with one of the other girls, I believe, in the care of that woman. Colonel Brandon had let her go because he liked the young girl who she was going with and trusted that they would be in good hands when they went to Bath and wouldn't be unaccompanied and would be, you know, watched over and provided for, and then she just disappears out of nowhere. And the friend was clearly in on it, but wouldn't say anything and the dad had no idea what's happening. And so Miss Williams, the daughter, is just kind of MIA for eight months and Colonel Brandon has no idea where she is.
Emily: And then finally, on the day when he so abruptly departed from Barton, what happened was that he had received a letter from Miss Williams. And so he immediately left, found her pregnant and very close to giving birth. And basically just had to immediately deal with the situation. But now very understandably holds a grudge against Willoughby because it was Willoughby who seduced this...
Lauren: Teenager!
Emily: 17-year-old [00:12:00] away from the protection of friends and family. Got her pregnant, said that he was going to come back and then just dipped.
Lauren: Presumably not long before he met Marianne.
Emily: Yeah. That's what the timeline seems to suggest.
Lauren: And it's also implied that, of course, because this is the 19th century and honor must be accounted for that the first time that Colonel Brandon met Willoughby, he also demanded a duel which both of them walked away unharmed from, which is why nobody knows about it. But Elinor asks him, you know, like, “Have you seen Willoughby since then?” Like, “that must have been painful.” And he was like, “yes, out of necessity, but we both walked away unharmed,” and Elinor was just like, Ugh, men.
Emily: Honestly, like, as much as I'm generally a pacifist, in that case, like, yeah. Brandon, shoot him. What a scoundrel.
Lauren: Take that man to task.
Emily: Hopefully he is out of their lives forever.
Lauren: …Anyway!
[laughter]
Emily: I was trying, I was trying to avoid looking at you because I don't want to be spoiled!
Lauren: Colonel Brandon comes to tell Elinor all this information because he's hoping that Elinor can tell Marianne and make her feel a little bit better because he knows that Elinor can tell her the information in a way that's sensitive to the way that Marianne is feeling and also hopes that Marianne will then absorb all this and realize that she dodged a bullet.
Emily: Yeah. And Colonel Brandon also says that he had intended to share this information with Elinor before, but the nature of the connection between Willoughby and Marianne was still unclear. Most people still believed that they were engaged. And so he ended up not telling Elinor at that time, but after the fallout, he decided to share that. And yeah, I just, Brandon is just, he's just trying to do best by everybody.
Lauren: I have lots to say about him later in the episode.
Notable Chapter Events
But other important events of note, both John Dashwood and our [00:14:00] favorite hate club member Fanny Dashwood also come to London. The Steeles also come to London and they have a get-together, of course, because most of them are, like, all related somehow. They make their introductions, people who haven't been acquainted become acquainted.
And the biggest thing is that Edward Ferrars' mother is in town, whom Elinor has never met. And so then, of course, Lucy makes things super dramatic, like, “Oh, Elinor, my dearest friend, you must feel bad for me because I'm so nervous because I'm going to meet the person who could become my mother-in-law.”
But the other bomb that is dropped during this episode is that Mrs. Ferrars is determined that he will marry Miss Morton, who was the daughter of a judge who has something like a fortune of 30,000 pounds, and that she will pay him to marry her 1000 pounds per year. So Lucy's probably not looking so hot either.
But Lucy has no idea. And Elinor is not going to say anything. So she just lets Lucy prattle on about, “Oh, I'm going to meet my future mother-in-law, won’t you please pity me,” trying to make Elinor feel guilty or envious or something. And Elinor is just like, Oh honey, you don't even know.
Emily: Yeah, Elinor sees that she's just trying to make her jealous. And in a moment of absolute savagery, as they're going up to the Dashwood's house, they're about to meet Mrs. Ferrars for the first time. Lucy says, “Oh, Elinor, pity me. I'm about to meet this woman who's going to be my mother.” And Elinor just says that she does pity her.
I just cracked up like, yes, Elinor. Don't give her anything.
Lauren: That's, that's all Lucy's dialogue is in these sections, is just constantly prodding at Elinor trying to make her jealous or to vocalize her jealousy or to vocalize her envy, like, something. And Elinor, to her credit, is able to keep her cool and not respond and not say anything.
She struggles to be polite, but she doesn't, like, rise to the bait, which honestly makes her a better woman than me, because I don't know if I would have had the patience. I [00:16:00] really don't. And then even within the socialization, Mrs. Ferrars is like giving Elinor the cold shoulder because she knows that Edward has an attachment to Elinor, which she doesn't want to go through because she wants him to marry this other super rich girl instead. Fanny Dashwood goes along with it because she doesn't like her husband's siblings anyway. And they're giving extra attention to Lucy, which Lucy takes as, Oh, this is a preference for me, not knowing that Lucy is not even part of the conversation. Like she is a nobody to them, but she's not Elinor.
Emily: Yeah. And in her second moment of savagery, Elinor basically says if they knew that you were supposedly engaged to Edward, they would not be treating you this well.
Lauren: And it's like, this is not evidence of you being accepted into the family because they don't know that you're engaged, so you can't take it that way.
And then, of course, Lucy tries to brush that off and is not happy about it, but.
Emily: Are there any other significant events that we need to make sure we cover before moving on?
Lauren: Edward comes to call on them at a time when Lucy and Elinor are the only people in the drawing-room and it's super awkward because then Elinor is the one who has to kind of direct the whole social interaction because Edward is clearly like a deer in headlights and has no idea what to do. Lucy is still pretending like, “Oh, Elinor doesn't know. So I can't be super obvious about my attachment with Edward.” So she just says nothing in the corner.
Emily: Stares at him lovingly the whole time.
Lauren: Either is staring at Edward or is shooting daggers at Elinor who’s trying to just keep this whole thing moving because nobody else is saying anything.
So Elinor's like, “Yeah, my mom is good. Yeah, Marianne is good, thank you for asking,” giving him a look like “hello, can you help me in this conversation?” No.
Emily: It's just a train wreck. And then, of course, Elinor goes to get Marianne and obviously gives Lucy and Edward some extra time alone. But then when Marianne gets in the room, she still thinks that Edward and Elinor have an attachment.
And so she's just so [00:18:00] effusive, and she's so happy to see him. And it's, it's just disastrous all around.
Lauren: And then that makes Edward feel more awkward because he knows that he doesn't deserve any of that extra happy attention. And Marianne, bless her, is just like, “Ugh. At least there's somebody here who can make one of us happy,” not realizing that he's making Elinor miserable.
What a section, honestly.
Emily: Wait, somebody also is convinced that Colonel Brandon is in love with Elinor. Who was it?
Lauren: John Dashwood.
Emily: Which like I've said before. I think Brandon and Elinor would be pretty cute, but also I just want, I just want them to, to be snark buds. I just want them to hang out.
Lauren: I like their platonic relationship.
Emily: They have really good chemistry as friends.
Lauren: Let men and women be friends, platonic relationships between genders are possible.
Trauma-Informed Reading of Sense and Sensibility 31-35
Emily: All right, now that I think we have sufficient plot context, let's talk about our overarching analytical theme of trauma and the idea of doing a trauma-informed reading.
Lauren: Yeah. So the idea for this theme or lens, whatever you'd like to call it, came from the idea of trauma-informed care or a trauma-informed approach, which is something that you usually hear in, like, healthcare or social work settings. And the basic idea is that it assumes that an individual is more likely than not to have a history of trauma. And so it recognizes the presence of trauma symptoms and acknowledges the role that trauma might play in an individual's life.
And the way that I heard it summed up that I thought was really helpful and also can help kind of guide this part of our discussion is that instead of asking, “what's wrong with this person?” a trauma-informed approach or trauma-informed question would be, “What happened to this person and what has happened in their past that might be causing them to act in this way?” Whether it's something that's obviously out of like grief or fear, or just a mannerism that they've developed out of trauma.
Emily: Yeah. I like that way [00:20:00] of looking at it, especially because today, with our general understanding of psychology, the way we tend to understand trauma is there being some big, violent event that leaves you with something like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, but that's not necessarily what trauma is. Even if we look at, for instance, the Dashwoods.
What has happened to them? They have had to leave the only home they've known in their entire lives. Poor Marianne just now has been very rudely disabused of what seems to be her first love. And so it's not necessarily, you know, having, having gone through a kind of violent act that has perpetrated upon someone.
But I would even say something that just very sharply forces you to reorganize your view on life.
Lauren: Yeah. I was thinking about that because the first instance where we see something that could be easily related to trauma is Marianne. And I think that people underestimate relationship trauma if it's not physical, and don't often take into account unless you or a loved one has experienced that, how traumatizing, like, relationships can be, whether there was some sort of like emotional abuse or not, like, the ending of a relationship can still be really traumatic.
And in Marianne's case, she's been publicly humiliated because everybody thought that they were engaged within their social circle. She found out that he was with someone else in a public setting. Didn't even get the chance to learn that privately because he didn't have the good grace to tell her. So she just showed up to a party and was blindsided by this. In addition to that, she strikes me as the type of person who would say, “Oh, well, you only fall in love once. And love is enough to conquer all. And you know, if you really love each other, then everything always works.” And that idea [00:22:00] has just been violently removed from her very permanently.
And that type of forced worldview shift can be really traumatic, especially because that's not just her worldview on love. That's her worldview on, like, life and humanity. And that's just been snatched away from her in a matter of minutes. And she has to deal with that in front of basically everyone she knows.
Emily: We especially tend to minimize these kinds of traumas that don't manifest as things like physical abuse, which I think is part of the reason that a lot of people don't recognize the traumas in their own lives. And I'm speaking for myself here too because we think that trauma can only be a, you know, a horrible car crash, you know, watching someone you love die, being in, on an active battlefield, things like that.
Lauren: Yeah. I think we always default to, well, somebody else has had it so much worse.
So what right do I have to, like, the pain or the anguish that I might be feeling, but that doesn't minimize the emotions that you're going through or the effect that they have on you. Just because it wasn't something that, like, everybody would universally recognize as clearly traumatic doesn't mean that it wasn't trauma.
Regency Psychology
Emily: Yeah. And with our modern understanding of psychology, I think we're coming to realize more and more that everything in our lives leaves some kind of psychological impact. And that's something that at this point in history when Jane Austen was writing, that wasn't really recognized. Psychology was a very different field at that time.
For one thing, it was still sort of, in the wake of the Enlightenment, considered to be a subset of philosophy. It wasn't really a medical field. It was treated very differently depending on the circumstance of the patient and of the person making the [00:24:00] diagnosis. So for one thing, they didn't have the kind of technology that we have now.
So any kind of diagnosis could only be made based on observable behaviors, but then also there was nothing resembling a standardized, psychological, or psychiatric practice, their--
Lauren: No DSM?
Emily: There was no DSM. There was no understanding of neuroscience, you know, our, the way that we currently conceptualize, like, “Oh, I need serotonin or dopamine or whatever,” that, that kind of neurochemical understanding didn't exist.
And so any kind of appearance of mental illness could be attributed to causes that were physical or emotional or even moral or spiritual. It really just depended on who, when, where this happened and to a pretty significant extent, I think that's still the case. We've seen more explicit reports in recent years of, for instance, the medical community just completely misunderstanding the way that people of different races experience pain.
There are doctors out there who think that Black people have a massively higher tolerance for pain than white people. And that stems directly from racist, pseudo-medical writing of the past centuries.
Lauren: It is stunning to me how texts that were written long before any of us were alive have influenced the medical field to the point where Black people are still receiving substandard care today because there are medical students who say like, “Oh, well, I actually thought that like Black people couldn't feel as much pain,” who will come into medical schools in the 21st century and say that completely in earnest because that's what they were taught.
That's horrifying to me.
Emily: Both then and now we end up begging the question of what [00:26:00] counts as a traumatic event. And who's given the privilege of being believed when they say that something was traumatic.
Lauren: And who's thought of as hysterical or blowing something out of proportion. Speaking of hysteria, one of the things that I noticed in this section is that Marianne isn't treated as hysterical.
Like she's actually treated with care by the other people around her because they understand why she's upset and that she has a reason to be upset. One of the things that's important when you are, like, trying to support or relate to somebody who's been going through a traumatic event is first just to acknowledge that it happened in the first place, instead of trying to convince them that it wasn't traumatic, or it wasn't that bad, is like, seeing pain and acknowledging it goes such a long way.
And I, I think it was a deviation from what you would expect, or how you would expect women to be treated. Like the people around her, don't say, “Oh, it's fine. You'll get over it. Like, you've had a little, lil drama in your love life. Now you can find somebody who will be your forever person.” They recognize like, no, this is incredibly painful.
And what he did was wrong and you have the right to be upset and to want to just hide away in your room and not to speak to any of us. And we get it.
Emily: Yeah. I think it's sort of a first instinct for people trying to support someone who's going through a traumatic event, especially when it's something that has to do with, like, interpersonal relationships is to try and minimize the amount of pain they appear to be feeling.
But a lot of us default to saying, “Oh, you're going to be fine. This is for the best,” when really, what you need to do to some extent is just to indulge that and say, “yeah, you're really hurting right now. This is a really horrible thing that happened to you.”
Lauren: That's something, yeah. That I've noticed myself falling into in the past either when relating to other people or to myself is like a need to constantly be positive.
And I've had to actively work against that because sometimes positivity isn't what you need. You just need to be miserable. And somebody in your ear constantly trying to make you be positive is actually making things a lot [00:28:00] worse. It's not making anything better. And--
Emily: Catharsis is such a thing, you know, when, when you find yourself sad and you're putting on more sad music, sometimes you really just need to like sob it out.
Lauren: Just lean into it. It's literally like completing the stress cycle. Like your body needs to be sad and to continue feeling those emotions for you to feel better and like doing nothing about it, doesn't help.
Get Colonel Brandon A Therapist
But speaking of people who just kind of hold everything in and don't talk about it for forever. Let's talk about Colonel Brandon and the trauma that he's clearly gone through and how he apparently hasn't spoken about this for fourteen years?!
Emily: He has so many layers of trauma going back so many years. For one, he was forcibly separated from this woman that he cared about very much when they were both quite young, she was married to his brother and he basically fucked off to the Indies with the military.
Lauren: He took that commission on purpose because he thought that being separated would be better for both of them.
And he makes a point as well to Elinor when he's telling the story is that he says to her, you know, you might not be able to tell from my disposition now, but like, I was really passionately in love with her and it just goes to show how much all of these events have changed him and the people around him, the same group of people have supported Marianne through like these difficult times and have been really understanding.
But they're more likely to kind of poke fun at Colonel Brandon for being quiet, for being uptight, for being reserved. And now we understand, and he's had to build up like this emotional armor because he was so deeply hurt before. So of course he's quiet and reserved because that's what he's learned to be.
That's what he's had to be.
Emily: I mean, he was actively punished for trying to act on his passions before with trying to elope with Eliza and his father kept them apart. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot going on there. And then of course, when he finally finds her again, [00:30:00] she's on the brink of death, which, I mean, it's traumatic in itself to witness something like that, especially with someone that you have known and loved for so long,
Lauren: In basically what's a debtor's prison and that's the first time he's seen her in years.
Emily: And then she in however little time she has before she dies, remands her three-year-old daughter to his care. So he's unexpectedly found the woman that he's loved for so long. She dies horribly. And now he's essentially a parent to this young child that he doesn't know who has been born from trauma, essentially.
Lauren: And can't fully explain to other people why he cares so much about this little girl who he says is a distant relation, but who he knows that people are making their own theories and making up rumors about.
Emily: That's its own little trauma is not being able to own the relationship.
Lauren: And having to keep that secret.
I imagine as well that it's retraumatizing when clearly he really cares about this girl. You know, I have complicated feelings when people say that like, people's children are like the only things they have left of that person, because they're not something that somebody else left behind. Like they're their own independent human being.
But I could imagine that he would feel a special connection to her because she's the daughter of this woman who he loved so much, and he's not able to fully express that either. We've already seen that he doesn't really express full emotion anymore because one of his trauma responses is just not to do that, but also can't communicate to other people why it is that he feels so much affection for this person because he's still trying to protect Eliza, the woman who he loved.
Emily: Yeah.
It wouldn't even reflect badly on him for him to tell the truth, but he's so protective of Eliza's reputation even now, so many years [00:32:00] after she fell into disgrace, he doesn't want to impart that kind of ill repute onto her. And so he's taken on that reputation by proxy, just letting people think that young Eliza, Miss Williams is his daughter born out of wedlock because he's, he's not going to smear the late Eliza's reputation that way.
Lauren: And he also clearly knows that it doesn't really hurt him socially at all. It's just a running joke, but nobody's going to shun him for having a love child because that's more expected of men, but it's a death knell for women to have.
Emily: Yeah. And then on top of all this, his adopted daughter has dropped off the face of the earth. Exactly like her mother did. And then when she resurfaces, she is pregnant out of wedlock and it's not only fresh trauma, but dredging up the scars of what would have happened so many years before when her own mother dropped off the face of the earth and had a child out of wedlock by a man who abandoned her.
Lauren: But then not only that, but in the midst of those eight months, he's finally let himself begin caring for somebody again, who reminds him so much of the woman who he had lost. Doesn't say anything about it because he can see that she's so clearly attached to this person.
And then when the adoptive daughter resurfaces. She's pregnant by the same man who the woman who he has grown to care for is apparently engaged to.
Emily: Brandon is just going through it. I mean —
Lauren: The poor man.
Emily: Just, I want to give him a hug and a therapist.
Lauren: He's got a lot to unpack in some therapy sessions.
Emily: He needs some compassion.
Lauren: Oh man.
Emily: Good Lord.
Lauren: And this increases Elinor's esteem for him. But I think also the reader gets such a better understanding of just who he is as a person and as a character and where he's coming from. And --
Emily: Yeah, we had no reason to think badly of him before. [00:34:00] He seems like a completely decent person, if you know, quiet and reserved, but now we know…
At least, we assume we know the full extent of this just stoic nobility and the duty that he feels to do right by the people in his life who are explicitly relying on him. And I can only imagine the depth of guilt that he must feel, even though he, he was not responsible for his ward being seduced away by a bad man.
He seems like the kind of person who would entirely blame himself for this. For not protecting her.
Lauren: 100%. He would put it on himself somehow. And that's one of the things that I was thinking about. I think one of the things that comes up more recently now that we're having these conversations about mental health.
And now that more people are open about going to therapy is people having the sometimes uncomfortable realization of, “Oh, how much of my personality is innate and how much of my personality is a trauma response?” and looking at how much is the personality of Colonel Brandon that we see is what's natural to him.
And how much is his response to all the traumas that have happened in his life over just the past 15 years because it's very heavily implied that when he was younger, this wasn't his personality at all. Elinor seems to have always been kind of the reserved, quiet person. And that's just kind of naturally how she is. Colonel Brandon not so much.
Emily: I'm just, I'm so sad for him.
Lauren: Me too!
Finding Empathy
And one of the things for trauma-informed approaches as well. The biggest thing that I think you get from that is greater empathy. And I think for Colonel Brandon, it's really easy to extend empathy, but then I was trying to extend that to other characters in the section, like Lucy was working my last nerve.
I was like, why are you so fixated on making Elinor envious and making her continue to be miserable? And that I was asking myself, okay, well, if I'm going to use that approach or that [00:36:00] question, has Lucy been made to feel unwanted? What happened in her past to where this is her response to Elinor all the time?
Like, does she need to feel validated all the time for a different reason? And then I could have more empathy for Lucy. It's like, okay, well, there might be a reason to what you're doing and I might not like it. And it might come off as really abrasive. But maybe there's a different, underlying reason for why you're doing what you're doing.
Emily: Something that came to mind as I was doing the historical research for this was the idea of individual versus collective trauma. And that's something that we can certainly relate back to our earlier episode on gender. Really, regardless of class at this point in history, every woman was operating on a certain level of collective gender-based trauma, just because of the way that their position was circumscribed in society.
Lauren: It's like, maybe we should extend the empathy to Fanny. You know, I guess.
Emily: Nah, fuck Fanny. Fanny gets no sympathy.
Lauren: I was looking for a reason to redeem her because I was like, maybe we're being too hard on this one character. Like, it's funny. But no, I have nothing.
Emily: She came from money into more money and she's just. She's always looking out for number one.
Lauren: I've really tried.
Emily: It's the Fanny Dashwood Hate Club! We made the right call on that one.
Lauren: That was an easy call at the beginning.
Pop Culture Connections
Emily: So did you have a pop culture connection for our trauma-informed reading? This is a really heavy topic, but,
Lauren: you know, I was worried that I was going to struggle, but I actually do have a pop culture connection for this.
Emily: Awesome. Tell me about it. I mean, not awesome because trauma, but so I — I'm, I'm eager to hear how you've connected it to modern media.
Lauren: Well, it is small perhaps, but I think it is notable. And the biggest parallel that I saw is how Colonel Brandon is Ned Stark from Game of Thrones.
Emily: Ooooh.
Lauren: So if you have not watched Game of [00:38:00] Thrones, be aware that I am about to spoil one of the big end game things for you from like, season seven.
So if you watched through season six, you're fine. If you've not seen season seven or eight, skip ahead, because I will spoil you. So if you don't want to be spoiled, this is your warning. In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark is the patriarch of the Stark family who was very quickly set up as the protagonist of the whole show.
The good guys who we're meant to root for, and Ned has five legitimate children with his wife, but he also has Jon Snow, who is also one of the protagonists of the TV show. And so for most of the show, we believe that Jon Snow is Ned Stark's son. You know, he has a different surname because bastard children weren't able to take the name of their father.
Jon is always treated as somebody who's kind of on the outside, but he doesn't know who his mother is, and Ned doesn't tell him. And in their last interaction, before they go their separate ways and Ned Stark's eventually killed. Ned says, you know, the next time we meet I'll tell you about your mother, but of course, that never happens.
And so what turns out is that similar to how Colonel Brandon had taken in basically his niece and had provided for her and basically taken on the shame from Eliza as his own, Jon Snow was never actually Ned Stark's son. He was Ned Stark's nephew. Ned's sister Lyanna had been secretly married to one of the people from the royal family.
She had Jon Snow and then promptly died, but before she died in childbirth had made Ned promise, like, please take care of my son. And because Ned's best friend was currently fighting against the royal family for the throne and his new nephew was technically a Targaryen who would have had more rights to the throne, he could never actually say who that was.
And similar to how Colonel Brandon kind of just takes on that shame. Ned Stark lets everybody believe that the honorable Ned Stark had a love child during the war and brought him home and he just [00:40:00] lets everybody talk about him. And is like, no, it's fine because I know why I'm doing this.
And I know that this is what honor looks like for me because I'm protecting this other person. Who's no longer here. Like both protecting Lyanna and protecting Jon, his nephew. So this is also my unofficial application to have a reboot of the Sense and Sensibility film adaptation, and have Sean Bean be in a role where he doesn't have to die.
[laughter]
Emily: Colonel Beandon!
Oh, that is a really fascinating pop culture connection though, with Game of Thrones, because that didn't occur to me at all. Not to mention Game of Thrones is just trauma smorgasbord.
Lauren: Oh yes. Every single one of those characters is traumatized.
Emily: Oh my God. In so many ways. Honestly, Game of Thrones is trauma porn.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: In Sense and Sensibility, we can sympathize quite easily with the traumatic events that these characters have been through, but Game of Thrones, just like, okay. But what if we made it worse, purely for the shock value basically, which we could also critique in modern media.
Lauren: Yeah. There are many things about Game of Thrones that I would like to critique, but that's a different podcast.
Final Takeaways
Shall we do final takeaways?
Emily: Let's do final takeaways.
Lauren: Emily, what are your final takeaways?
Emily: My final takeaway is similar to, I think what we’ve said in the past that there's always nuance to a situation, but also some people are just horrible.
Lauren: Okay.
Emily: That's my takeaway. Some people just suck. What about you? Hopefully, it's more nuanced than mine.
Lauren: Well, what I was going to say is that my final takeaway is that we should all have more patience with one another because we don't know what is in their past that they might be constantly responding to or what caused them to respond the way that we did. And there's no way for us to know unless they disclose that to us.
And they're probably not going to, and I — that's, that's a reminder that I have to have for myself sometimes too, [00:42:00] because I think that I can be impatient with people or quick to form a snap judgment. And I think this has been a good exercise in having more patience and empathy for other people.
Emily: And, I think that's a, a good lesson to draw from this.
Lauren: Mhm. So sorry, Lucy Steele. I'll be nicer to you.
Emily: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time, for a change of pace, we'll be reading chapters 36 to 40 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of joy.
Lauren: To read a full transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find show notes 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, @ReclaimingJanePod, or leave us a review on iTunes. Reclaiming Jane is produced and 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: Yeah, I think about hysteria all the time, because that's one of those fun little things you learn in, you know, psych 101, really for centuries and up until the modern age, the uterus and its misbehavior was blamed for basically anything that could be pointed out as being wrong with a woman.
If she was depressed, if she was acting promiscuous, Well, her, her womb was wandering.
Lauren: It's that darn uterus.
Emily: Yes. It's that darn uterus and the cure is to get married and get pregnant. Cause that'll put your uterus literally back in its place and then you'll be fine, which is for the record, insane. That is not based on anything scientifically sound.
We do not endorse the hysteria theory of psychology.
Lauren: Just the concept of a wandering ute- uterus. Like the [00:44:00] mental image of that is so funny. Wandering, where? Do you know how many internal organs we have? Where is it going?
Emily: So just, just hanging out wherever it was. It's like an octopus, it just squeezes through whatever little opening. It was like, yeah. I'm just going to hang out by your lungs now.
NBD.
Lauren: I was just going to say, I'm just going to hang out by the heart today, you know, just have a little emotional little gathering. Lil hang out session.