Live from Pemberley: Crossed in Love (Chapters 24 + 25)

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I find chapter 24 of Pride and Prejudice deeply tender. It is a quiet chapter, three quarters of which is a conversation between Jane and Lizzie. Jane gets another letter from Caroline, which makes clear that Bingley isn't coming home to Netherfield anytime soon. And Caroline tries to make clear that Bingley was never that interested. so Jane should give up all hope of him. Jane takes the message as it is intended and is deeply hurt. Lizzie is much more skeptical of the letter's accuracy.

Jane's only way to cope with this heartbreak is to talk to Lizzie, and the two have the loveliest type of conversation, one of genuine care. Lizzie is... livid at Bingley for being so easily pushed around and at Darcy and Caroline for doing the pushing. She is desperate, watching her favorite person being in pain and being unable to fix it. Jane thinks that she must have projected her own attraction onto Bingley.

Lizzie thinks that that is impossible, but makes space for Jane's feelings, even while they each maintain their own positions. The two are quite philosophical in their conversation, discussing human nature, designs, the essence of a good marriage. And they are written as equals. Here is Professor Susan Zlotnick on Jane. and her dynamic with Lizzie.

Critics refer to her as the Richardsonian sister, right? Because she seems like she's come out of a novel by Samuel Richardson, you know, like a Pamela, in that she's like the kind of good, steady, morally... centered character, you know, and she's also a figure for modesty, right? You know, that she will not show her feelings, which is of course what a woman is supposed to do. She is not supposed to show her feelings, but in the...

the real world of marriage and courtship. As Charlotte says, you need to show a little bit of your feelings or else the guy's never going to know. So, I mean, I think there's that going on with her. Jane, at the end of their conversation, has heard everything Lizzie said. She ends by saying that she wishes to assume good intentions, saying, let me take it in the best light.

in the light which it may be understood. And Lizzie, the text tells us, cannot oppose such a wish. Reading this intimate scene between Lizzie and Jane, I can't help but think of Austin's own close relationship with her sister, Cassandra. Here is Professor Claudia Johnson on the Austin Women's Sisterhood. We know that Cassandra adored her sister, and we know that she treasured all of the little relics that Austen left, which were pretty pitifully few when she died.

We know that Cassandra was somewhat cooler and more reserved and that Jane was the more expansive with her wit. So that does sort of match with the Elizabeth Jane paradigm. you know they loved and trusted each other she was the only one sort of really in on the secret of the composition of the novels as they were being developed she was with her

Sister, when she died, you know, she closed her eyes. I mean, it's a very, it's a very touching story. She was the son of my life. She was the son of my life. is a quote from Cassandra in a letter she wrote shortly after Jane Austen's death. That is the feeling you get in this chapter, that Jane and Lizzie are the lights of each other's lives. The other things that happen in this chapter all happen in just three paragraphs. Mr. Bennett makes fun of Jane's heartbreak.

Mr. Wickham grows in everyone's esteem by being unreserved in complaining about Darcy now that Darcy is conveniently out of town. Again, we are told no one likes Mr. Darcy.

So it's an easy win for Wickham. In Chapter 25, we meet the gardeners. The gardeners are Mrs. Bennett's brother and sister-in-law, and they are awesome. They are adored by their nieces. They are caring and kind. They work for a living, and yet, yet, yet, they have good manners? Mrs. Gardner notices Jane's sadness. and so invites Jane to stay with them in London, which Jane readily accepts. It will bring her closer to Bingley and the possibility of seeing him, even though it is said,

that the Bingley's would never visit the Gardner's part of town. Then Mrs. Gardner, kind and moderate and good, meets Wickham, and she adores him. She is from the same part of the country and loves getting the gossip that she's missed out on over the last decade or two. She can't quite remember any rumblings about a young Fitzwilliam Darcy.

But by the end of an evening of talking with Wickham, she suddenly recollected that the young Darcy was known to be a proud dick. I'm Vanessa Zoltan. And I'm Lauren Sandler. And this is Live from Pemberley from Hot and Bothered. Lauren. We meet the gardeners. We do. I love the gardeners. I love the gardeners. You're right. They are awesome. The gardeners are who I most wish for in my own life. I think out of everyone in this book.

What do you feel like we need to know before we talk about these two chapters? Well, thinking about the gardeners and thinking about London and the invitation to London, which Jane heartily accepts.

You know, this thing that Lizzie said, saying like, oh my God, like there's no way that Bingley's going to come to Cheapside, going to come to Grace Church Street where the gardeners live. It's just interesting to dive into this a little bit and to think about how geographically close Mayfair, where Grosvenor Square is, where Darcy's house is. is to Cheapside. In fact, I walked it when we were just in London quite recently, but it's a world away class-wise.

It's interesting, Bond Street had just been developed in Mayfair, which is where all of the really fine haberdasher shops were and where all the fine tailoring exists. But everything that you could buy on Bond Street, you could... also buy where the gardeners lived the same products, but at cheaper prices. And often the servants of Mayfair would go buy things for their employers exactly where the gardeners lived. And they'd be the exact same.

same products. They'd just be for less money and the retail averse. part of my heart, which I should say is my entire heart, hears this and just thinks of, you know, these wealthy people as absolute fools. Why wouldn't you want the same hat at a lower price? And why wouldn't you want the experience of... of buying it in a sort of bustling, vibrant community. And of course, that is exactly the class division, right? You know, it's the idea of the label. It's the idea of the quiet. It's the idea.

of what an elite urban design looks like versus something that feels a little scrappier. While the gardeners may have the elegance in their manners of Mayfair, they indeed have the address of Cheapside. I just want to point, of course, cheap is a pun that has already come up already. It's something that Caroline has already.

laughed about. The word cheap actually comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word for market, because this was always a marketplace. Side actually comes from a Germanic word for something that is adjacent to. So that's the road that... runs along the market. And if you walk down... Cheapside in London today, you'll still see that there are streets named for milk and poultry for the cobblers that used to work there. So this sort of historic commerce is very alive and well.

And definitely not what we think of when we think about proximity to Kensington Palace. Oh, Lauren, I love all of this. I have just a couple of thoughts. One is... That when you're talking about the price difference between buying something on Bond Street versus buying something in cheap side.

Rich people can afford to pay for shopping as an experience. They're not shopping for goods. They are shopping as an activity. We're going shopping, right? And like that's all the difference in the world. You know, like that's it. It's like half a mile. And from Bond Street to Cheapside, you go from shopping as an activity to I need a new hat. And so I'm going to go to the Haberdashers.

And of course, we are all living with this still, right? I mean, this is what the advent of luxury goods were all about. This is what the advent of branding is all about. And this is, of course, what the aspirational aspect of these things might be. I mean, I remember just what certain shops represented to me growing up as a kid, like the Atrium and Chestnut Hill was where all the really fancy shops were. It was this.

new concept, this deluxe mall that opened in the eighties. And I was a TJ Maxx kid. And the fact is I could buy the same brands at TJ Maxx with my grandmother that like some of my classmates were shopping for at the atrium. Chestnut Hill, but it felt like a completely different world. So I think that this is something that was very much planted during this era as a way of delineating.

class and where one would purchase identical materials. And here we are still. And Lauren, all of the stuff about how close these two places are, but the... magnitudes of miles between them right I was thinking about it again in this chapter that You know, Jane can get herself to London, but she isn't allowed to go over to Bingley's. And I was thinking, you know, the Bennett sisters are screwed because it's five girls.

But we find out in this chapter that Charlotte's kind of screwed because she has a lot of brothers. And so there isn't one brother who's going to inherit everything and have to take her under his wing. But she's sort of going to be shuffled around by all the different brothers, right? Like Jane says, what is she supposed to do, right?

all these brothers so no one else will take care of her. It just feels like unless you're born privileged and a man half a mile or the number of siblings you have can just determine everything. Absolutely.

I also think that what comes up in these two chapters is this real question of what is marriage for? You know, in a conversation that we had. in the last episode was about what marriage represented in the era that predated this book and what it would come to represent in the time afterwards and how much this... book was related to that, but these indeed are these deeply rooted questions about whether love and affection and happiness

are relevant at all, or whether, you know, this is simply an arrangement, which is a necessity for any person who is born female. And I think that in this chapter, we find out at least it's the chapter where it clicked for me, that Jane really loves Bingley. Jane has been pressured into this relationship with Bingley by Mrs. Bennett, but she's heartbroken by this.

And she believed Caroline, that Caroline really cared about her. She's also heartbroken by how clearly Caroline has kind of dumped her as a friend. But... She isn't sad that she's missed an opportunity for marriage. She's sad about Bingley. You know, it makes me wonder, you know, how people... were able to know what real love was within the constraints of the time. And indeed, this is something that Lizzie and Mrs. Gardner are trying to parse out together, right?

Lizzie is saying that Jane's suffering is so great because of her love for Bingley. And Mrs. Gardner is trying to figure out what that actually means, right? She says, and this is one of my favorite lines in this reading. The expression of violently in love is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, but it gives me very little idea. And then they try to work through together exactly how they know that Jane is in love, right?

she actually feels how Lizzie got to witness how much more remarkable the Jane and Bingley connection was each time they met. What it actually means to feel love instead of being put through the paces. of these customs, these dances, these letters, you know, whatever it is that exists between two people who...

aren't allowed to actually be alone in a room together or write each other directly. And I think that they end up making a really good case here for what real love looks like within these constraints. And they're right. That there is a violence to it, right? What Jane says is...

Oh, that Mrs. Bennett would have more command over herself. Mrs. Bennett is walking around the house lamenting that Bingley has gone. And Jane says she can have no idea of the pain she gives me by her continual reflections on him. Right? Like it hurts that she has been separated from him. And I feel like it's one of the only times we hear Jane say something like, I'm in pain. Like she is saying, I am in pain over the fact that he has left.

Which, of course, then Mr. Bennett starts to play with in a way that is, I think, in some ways somewhat knowing and ironically funny and in other ways like. just insufferably sexist, right? Where he is saying to Lizzie, Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It's something to think of and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions. When is your turn to come? He asks Lizzie. And I mean... There's something so obnoxious about this.

But he's also right. There is something about wanting to feel, right? About wanting not necessarily to be crossed in love, but I do think that many of us are looking for the experience of yearning in a different way.

that at least the men that we are introduced to in so much of literature may not necessarily feel. Of course, this is part of why we love Darcy, is we learn that he feels it perhaps most of all. Yeah. I really hate Mr. Bennett's glibness, and Jane isn't confiding in him, so he doesn't know how much pain she's in. But, you know, there's a line just a page later from where I was talking about before where she goes, thank God I have not that pain, right?

Which implies that she's feeling many other kinds of pain. And, you know, the other pain that she says she avoided is that, you know, she hasn't done harm to anyone but herself. She's sort of broken her own heart by being so hopeful. But she's like, at least. I didn't embarrass myself. And you're just realizing that like...

She was so trapped. She wanted to flirt enough to make him know that she was serious, but not so much that she put her sisters at risk. She didn't want to make them more foolish than they were. These, these teeny, teeny spaces and Mr. Bennett is making light of it. And I'm like, this is her whole life. This is her career. This is her having a house. This is her saving her sisters. And I know that.

The generous reading of it is obviously that Mr. Bennett like can't stand to see his daughter in pain and so is making light of it. But in this chapter, she is so hard on herself and so. depressed about this and I find him really tonally way, way off. I have a slightly different read of it. I think that his tone is very firmly located in his relationship with Lizzie.

And their love language is irony and wit and a little bit of sarcasm. That's the thing they get to do with each other that they don't get to do with anyone else. And I think that what he's really saying here is, Lizzie, I want you to be able to fall in love too. I want you to be able to have something too. And what we find, you know.

throughout these two chapters is how much Lizzie protects herself against the ability to fall in love, right? Mrs. Gardner says, Lizzie, you would have laughed yourself out of this spot, even if you were in the same straits that Jane would. even if you had been feeling the same thing. And I think that what we really see through Lizzie's discussions with Jane is how much she's protecting herself from believing in someone and being let down by them. And I think that Mr. Bennett is saying.

sweetie, I also want you to find love and I don't want you to worry that getting hurt might make it not worth it.

That's a very generous reading. And you know I'm a sucker for a generous reading. So now I can't. disagree with it. But you know, I am also a sucker for love being expressed through humor and sarcasm. And I think that that is why as much as Mr. Bennett is infuriating in so many ways, I do love him in these moments. moments. I understand why he's the worst. There's also part of him that to me is also the best. No, I mean, I think Austin felt the same.

way about him and it's my 21st century gaze that's like this toxic masculinity masquerading as charm but i don't think that that's the intention with which he was written at all i also really love what you're pointing out about Lizzie that Mrs. Gardner and Mr. Bennett are both pointing out to her that she's someone who's too guarded, right? We know she super likes Wickham and she is...

keeps being like, yeah, he's not going to choose me. It's fine. It's just flirtation. And she's going to get more and more vehement about that in the coming chapters. And we know that this is one of the ways she changes. after seeing Pemberley, but after getting to know Darcy better.

She's like sick over the idea that she was too closed off to him. And so she she opens up a little bit. And I love that we are really getting shown the extent to which she is closed off, that the people she loves are like. I would like to reflect to you that you are very defensive and that that is one of the things that we see her grow in, at least a little bit, is her ability to be more vulnerable.

At this point in the book, it seems as though she sees her own prejudice as a form of maturity. And I think that what's really remarkable is that the book carries her even beyond that. by its end. But it does make me think about this quote that we wanted to

unpack together where Lizzie says, the more I see of the world, the more I'm dissatisfied with it. And every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of. either merit or sense. It feels like, yeah, when you are getting towards the end of your teens, like this is this is what you develop into. Right. As someone who feels sort of world weary and cynical and wears that cynicism as a badge of maturity.

And yet, I think we see her being right and wrong all at the same time here. I really fall for Lizzie in this one line. She says, there are few people whom I really love and still fewer of whom I think well, right before the sentence you pointed to. I love that she's saying.

There are a lot of people I love who I don't even think well of, right? There is something cynical about that. But, you know, what we're inferring is that she loves Lydia, even though she doesn't think well of Lydia. She loves her mother, even though she doesn't think well of her mother. And I find that to be its own romantic thing or about loyalty, right, that you can love past liking. It just struck me as a very sweet sentiment.

Oh, I agree. And she brings up Charlotte's marriage immediately as an example of this. Like, you know, she's obsessed and incensed with Charlotte saying yes to Collins. And yet... she still loves Charlotte and it doesn't matter. Like, you know, it matters because she's going to agonize over it. But at the end of the day, she might not think well of Charlotte for this, but it's not going to stop her from loving her best friend.

Maybe that is actually a true sign of maturity right there. And the other thing that strikes me as interesting about this very specific section is that Jane... hints, I think again, that her optimism is a choice. and that it is a strategy. She says, my dear Lizzie, do not give way to such feelings as these. They will ruin your happiness, right? You might be right, but who cares? It's not a happy way to live.

We often think of Jane as naive, but I think she's knowingly making a choice. She's like, until I have evidence otherwise, let me believe the best in them. I mean, the line that I love, right, is she's like. Let me have the version that I can understand because I can't understand a world in which Caroline is so cruel. That would really break my heart.

if I was totally deceived by someone. So it will make me feel better to think that I was confused, that our feelings were reciprocated, rather than thinking that there's a cruelty to the world. She might not be right, but she knows she might not be right. And she's choosing this anyway because she thinks she will be happier if she does. But what do you think of that? I think that there's very little risk in it.

I don't see the downside of it with these people who she thinks she's not really ever going to see again. Like, let me just think well of them. What difference does it make? And I think that Austin agrees with you. Clearly, Jane is written with such affection, but... I mean, I, like Lizzie, would just be silently infuriated and obsessively just steaming about...

Jane's response and what that means for Jane, right? How could these people take advantage of my dear, naive sister, my sister who is so good that she's determined to see the best in everyone, and yet she's dead wrong. And I've promised I wouldn't say anything about it, but I'm just like biting my lip at every single second. Like it's that feeling of knowing better is not always a good feeling. It can be an incredibly... painful feeling. But it is, I think, always

a feeling of superiority. And I do think that Lizzie, even though she believes that Jane nominally is a superior person for how good she is, right? We hear her express that as a form of love. It is in fact Lizzie. and this is why Lizzie is our heroine and not Jane, who is the person who's actually seeing it and feeling it in a way that Jane isn't.

Because Jane is choosing not to. And Lizzie is saying, I can't choose not to see that. It's right in front of me. Yeah. I also just think that there's something in their dynamic that allows them both to be this. You know, we joke in the house that, like, I'm depressed this week. You can't be, right? Like, it's your job to not be the depressed person.

Lizzie gets to be as cynical as she is because Jane's going to push back. And Jane gets to be optimistic as she is because Lizzie is going to point something out that's really dangerous. And that's one of the beautiful things about their dynamic is that they're allowed to live into these parts of each other because they have one another. And I just wonder, without one another, if Jane would become more skeptical. We see when Jane is separated from...

lizzie and is in london she is going to see things differently and we see that when lizzie is separated from jane she is going to see that charlotte is happy when they're together they get to retreat into their corners of their like more Not based in a bad way, but like their most like natural states, but they carry each other with them when they're out in the world.

And so when over the rest of the book, we're not going to see Jane and Lizzie together a lot. We're going to be reading their letters to one another. And I think that they are literally carrying each other's voices with them as they go out in the world. And that's always, to me, the sign of the truest, deepest friendship is when someone says to me or I say to them, I've been talking to you in my head constantly. It's such a refrain with some of my oldest, deepest, deepest friends.

I think it's interesting to note the other sisterhood dyad, which we haven't seen that much of yet, but will become really significant later in the book, which is the Kitty-Lydia dyad. And they don't complement each other, right? of the same thing. And so bad things happen in that situation when you don't have the sort of stop gap of a different way of thinking.

And I think that thinking about complementary relationships is so important and so interesting, which brings me to the sentence.

in this reading that most reminds me of you, Vanessa, and most reminds me of your writing and thinking. I felt like I was reading something out of praying with Jane Eyre when I happened upon it, which is when Austin writes, In the voice of Lizzie, you shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, the endeavor to persuade yourself or me.

that selfishness is prudence and insensibility of danger, security for happiness. It's a kind of weird sentence, but one which I think is packed with meaning. What do you make of it, Vanessa? They're talking about Charlotte, right? And Jane is saying...

Yeah, we thought Collins was ridiculous, but maybe he's right for Charlotte. You know, she, as I was talking about, has all these brothers and, you know, like she didn't have another situation. She was getting older. She didn't have other options. And Lizzie is saying, no, regardless of Charlotte's situation, selfishness is not prudence or insensibility of danger.

Security is not happiness. Like, these are not the same things. I may want them to be true for Charlotte, but that doesn't mean I get to change definitions just because Charlotte has now made the decision. It's, do you know what it is, Lauren? It's laws and principles for women such as these when her bodies and souls rise in mutiny against them, right? Lizzie is saying the same thing that Jane Eyre is saying, right? That like.

When our friend marries the jerk, that is not the moment that we redefine jerk. That is actually the moment that we have to hold on to jerk and grieve the fact that our friend had to marry one. This is why. love you is I hear your voice in my head as I'm reading Pride and Prejudice and as I'm happening upon this sentence. Like, I know that this is the thing that you have taught me. And yet...

There's something else here too, which is that this is in response to something else that I think really matters, which is also a really important principle, which is Jane saying to Lizzie, you do not make allowance enough for differences of situation.

temper. There's actually something incredibly modern about that, right? Saying that, you know, there is not a one size fits all policy for what romantic happiness is what marital happiness is what domestic happiness is that we're all different in these respects and of course you know leaning into particular individual desires is really a sign of progress when you consider what love and marriage has always meant, or at least within this era has meant in Austen's England. I mean, it's...

It is the same fight that Rochester and Jane are having in that laws and principles conversation, right? Rochester is saying, but my circumstances are so specific. Can we just be happy? And can you leave your laws and principles behind? It's just interesting in terms of, right, like these books are written about 40 years apart, published about 20 years apart. Like this conversation is just continually happening of when do I stay committed to my...

to my previous laws and principles that I developed when I was quite sane. And when do I bend? Because Charlotte is scared and this guy is going to give her a house. And like that matters. And Jane. It's a psychological argument in an interesting way, too. Jane is saying, like, I want to wish well for them. And I feel like part of what Jane is saying is, like, if I wish well for them.

I will treat them differently. And then therefore they have a better chance at being happy, right? Like it can matter that we are going to choose to be optimistic in this way. And I do think that Lizzie carries that with her by going to visit Charlotte and Collins. I wonder if Jane hadn't put that spin on it, if Lizzie would have readily accepted the invitation and gone, which validates the marriage as a real marriage.

Lizzie's going to go and compliment the house and affirm Charlotte in her new life. So again, I think Lizzie takes Jane's strategy seriously, even as she's disagreeing with it.

In this passage, Lizzie is using some pretty extreme language, right? She's saying selfishness. She's saying danger. She lays out this laws and principles idea. And then she really, really leans into it, that selfishness is prudence and insensibility of danger, security for happiness. What do you think she means by selfishness? Where is the danger in this situation? I think that she thinks Charlotte is so afraid of getting herself into a danger.

dangerous situation where she is homeless and living at her brothers and sisters-in-law's houses as the leech that she is going to choose a... potentially really bad marriage. And so she's saying like, that is not prudence. Like. I don't care if you won't have a house. Like you can stay with your brothers and rather be a leech on everyone for the rest of your life than tie yourself to a man who you think is ridiculous.

And of course, this is why Lizzie said no to Collins. And this is, of course, why Mrs. Bennett is in a nervous state where she can't believe how she's been thrown over by her own family, as she puts it.

Because these are just completely opposite ways of thinking about what life is, what love is, what one's future is, what one's possibilities are. I mean, it's just such a... philosophical break that I think to feel it within a friendship and within a family can be just really deeply, deeply painful.

I mean, speaking of Mrs. Bennett, we know from what we've been talking about, Jane is like, I wish mom would stop talking about this. She doesn't know how much it hurts me. And then the gardeners show up in chapter 25 or volume two, chapter two. And Mrs. Bennett, right, like it starts all over again, right? She's like, my dear sister, Mrs. Gardner, you have no idea.

I forgive Jane for being abandoned by Bingley because she was innocent. She just got abandoned. But Lizzie, can you believe it? And this is right like Mrs. Gardner comes in and is like, Lizzie, good work. And that comes from, right, like, Mrs. Gardner married a man she loves and they're financially stable. Or we don't know how loving it is, but she married a man she respects and likes.

And they're going to go on a vacation together because they enjoy each other's company. And they have kids and a good house. And right like Mrs. Gardner has. has lived this other way. And I wonder if that is part of what gives Lizzie her confidence, right? She's like, I don't need to marry a gentleman. I can marry a working class guy and have a really good marriage like my aunt and uncle and live in a comfortable house.

Yes. And even more than that, she's elegant. She's fashionable. You know, she and her husband are described as being people who would like shock the Netherfield girls for how of a certain class they seem. by being well-mannered and well-dressed. You know, I love that she's coming and reporting on the latest fashions. I mean, of course I love that. There's also a real sort of wise sisterliness to her.

And the fact that they communicate as openly as they do, that they confide with each other, that they write each other, that it feels like we are women of the same mind. There's something so beautiful in that, so that it's so validating. all of Mrs. Gardner's life choices.

Yeah, right. Like there's like an order of things that she has to do when she arrives. And the first is, you know, report on the latest fashions from London. And then the second is to be the mother that these children actually deserve instead of the mother that they've got. Mrs. Gardner steps into that really beautifully. But I love the turn at the end of this chapter also, which is that she's so smart.

She's so wise. She is younger than Mrs. Bennett and is able to step into this maternal role. Her kids are much younger than Jane and Lizzie. You get the impression that she's half aunt. half older sister and yet she's she's so willingly steps into the generational divide and it's like sure i will be mentor but she gets taken in by wickham you know she is like

oh my God, it's so fun to hear about all these people, you know, like, oh my God, you also knew, you know, Mrs. Smith, how's she doing? I remember that pond. And it's just so. So insidious to me, the text ends. On being made acquainted with the present Mr. Darcy's treatment of Wickham, Mrs. Gardner tried to remember some of that gentleman's repeated disposition when quite a lad.

And was confident at last that she recollected having heard Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, formerly spoken of as very proud, ill-natured boy. And he's like brainwashing her, right? She's like, oh, he's a jerk. He did what to you? I don't remember him. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. He was a jerk. And I love it because it's showing us that this like very reasonable, lovely woman can completely be taken in by this manipulative ass.

It also makes me think about the incredible pleasure of having sort of like a shared enemy to gossip about of like what it means to feel like, oh, there's this one person who we all hate. And now we have more fodder for that hatred. And there's such a spark in there and it all unites us and it gives us something.

fun to think about, you know, and in this world in which gossip is entertainment and also rumor is a news source, like this has just got it all, right? Especially when Throughout a family, there's so much disagreement about Collins, about Lizzie, about Charlotte, about...

Bingley about, you know, like no one can see eye to eye about anyone except they all know that they can't stand Darcy. And there is something that I think is just like a cup of wine about that. And of course, that's going to affect Mrs. Gardner. even if she is truly one of the sanest of the bunch. Because that's what you do over dinner, right? Oh, yeah. Isn't that the whole point of celebrities? Is to be like, oh my God.

I know. He seems like a jerk based on no information. And like one piece of rumor about one actor and I'm ready to, you know. Kick him to the curb. And Darcy's not around, right? He's like a celebrity. He's super rich. He's untouchable. He's not here. Like, let's talk shit about him like he's Ryan Gosling. Like, who cares? Justin always refers to the magazine us as them.

Because, of course, it's not about us at all. And I feel like Darcy is sort of the ultimate them, right? Yeah. He's in Mayfair. He would need to bathe for a month, Lizzie tells us, if she was to so much as cross the gardener's threshold. them as they get. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Well, Lauren, we're off to London. Who doesn't love a trip to London? I mean, you and I recently went on one and I gotta say, it was a good time.

I just wish that Jane could have as good a time in London as we did. Well, I'm very excited to talk about Jane's time in London. More time with the gardeners. So much. in the next three chapters. So depending on how your book is formatted, it's either chapters 26 through 28 or chapters three to five of volume two. But that's what we'll be talking to you about in our next episode. You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a pain to switch.

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So something that we've been talking about a lot throughout this season is Mrs. Bennett and whether or not... She is correct to be so anxious about the situation that she's in and how the novel laughs at her and she gets villainized for being so nervous. And it's annoying how often she complains about her nerves. but that those nerves come from somewhere. And we didn't talk much about it in this week's episode.

But we were wondering about this history of women's nerves or what anxiety would have been considered and thought of in the 19th century, especially around ideas of hysteria. So we're going to get one of my favorite people, one of the most brilliant people I know on the phone, Dr. Amy Hollywood, who is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard. And she knows everything about everything. So we will see what she has to say on the topic. Hi, Amy.

Hi, Vanessa. So the reason I love talking to you about these things is because you are an expert in medieval Christianity, and I blame medieval Christianity for everything I don't like about contemporary culture. Is that fair? I feel like that's, you know, the origins. Yeah. But I'm wondering if you if you can tell us a little bit about how hysteria.

And like women's feelings would have been diagnosed sort of throughout the second half of the second millennia. Well, I mean, the thing is, is the diagnosis of hysteria. Actually, you shouldn't blame. The Middle Ages. You need to blame the Greeks for this because it is a Greek medical term. Medical. with giant quotation marks around it, to talk literally about the moving womb. It's the word for womb. And the idea was that women's wombs...

moved around inside their bodies and in moving around inside their bodies would like hit up against the heart and give them heart palpitations or, you know, move around their bowels and give them stomach upset. I mean. all these physiological symptoms that we now associate with anxiety, I think most often, that were attributed to...

women and seen as much more likely and if and or only things that would be suffered by women. So that Greek medical tradition, it's actually transmitted to the Christian Middle Ages largely through. arabic muslim medical texts and so there's this whole history of the transmission of these ideas so hysteria yeah hysteria is like the womb moving around and by the time we get to the 19th century by the time we get to austin they know the womb is not moving

around inside of women's bodies. So I was thinking about it in terms of Austin, where it's like the vapors, nerves. It was this idea of just women's greater susceptibility to their feelings. And like an inability to control their feelings. Sometimes their greatest susceptibility to feeling is seen as a good thing. And sometimes it's seen as a bad thing. And so I feel like Mrs. Bennett is sort of the.

extreme case of like when feelings get away from you and it becomes utterly negative, if that makes sense. How do you perceive the way that Austin is drawing out Mrs. Bennett and that she is using nerves?

as an excuse to just sort of be insufferable sometimes? Or do you think that Mrs. Bennett actually does have like an anxiety disorder that she's trying to say, like, please help take care of me? I don't think we're supposed to read Mrs. Bennett in that way. I think we're supposed to read her. It's really annoying. Yeah. I think that in the 18th century, turn of the 19th century, there is this desire to...

have affect feeling tempered by reason, and Mrs. Bennet represents the inability to do that. She can't temper her affect with reason, and therefore... causes all this trouble for herself and for everybody around her. And I do think it gets read as a moral failing. So it's not just that she's a silly woman who's, you know, annoying or, but it's also, I don't know, maybe this is just my read. I don't know. But I feel like Austin is really a moralist. And so she's always thinking about like.

when is somebody too much and how do we get them in the balanced place where they have a heart, but they also have, you know, they have sensibility, but they also have sense, you know, so, so I mean, wrong novel, but, but, you know, that those things are coming together. And so that's what.

I think of Mrs. Bennet as like there's the kind of no plus ultra of the sensibility gone utterly awry and so that like who she is in terms of what she desires and how annoying she is are all part and parcel of something that is being mocked or satirized satirized is probably the better word is there a reason like historically as to why certain things

Certain diagnoses get gendered as male and others as female. Does it go back to the Greeks? Like, is this Aristotelian? I mean, the thing is, is there's this is where the history is really complicated because there's. couple competing different greek medical traditions and that by that by the time you get into the middle ages and into early modernity and then into the

natural sciences trying to figure out what's real and what's not real in that material, they're conflated in complicated ways. And that's a big complicated history that I don't know the details about. What I can say is that

There's certainly a tendency in something like humorial theory, the theory of the humors, to read. imbalances in the humors as gendered and to read like certain humors as more associated with femaleness and others more associated with maleness. But I mean, the thing that's really interesting is somebody like Kant. you know, that German philosopher who's...

probably an exact contemporary of Austin's, he was obsessed with his own hypochondria. And he spent enormous amounts of time reading all this medical literature, like trying to figure out what was wrong with him and how to understand it and how to understand the nerves. and how to understand their relationship to the bodily organs and what was happening to him when he had these various things that we would now associate, I think, pretty clearly with anxiety. And so the notion of the hypo...

chondriac and the person with stomach ailments and nervous disorders around the stomach. I mean, Kant, who's like the figurehead of the Enlightenment, was sitting around being like, Why am I such a hypochondriac? Let me read all this medical stuff and figure it out. So it's so on the one hand, it's a meta hypochondriac. Exactly. So on the one hand, it's gender. But on another hand.

There's these things that are also going on and nobody like reads Kant and thinks about that because people don't read those parts of Kant. But it's all there if you read the not the big four books, but look at the other stuff. And so. So it's both gendered and not in complicated ways. Do you think that it's fair from a 21st century perspective to look back at Mrs. Bennett and be like, this is a woman with an anxiety disorder?

It's funny because I hadn't thought about it until I started talking just now about it. And I thought, well, she kind of does have an anxiety disorder, right? Like now we've got a name for everything. So if you're irritated by the sound of people chewing, there's a word for that now. And from that perspective, like, yeah, could you go back and read it and be like, to what extent is she just so anxious that every stimulus is an irritant to her? I just have one more.

question for you. And that is wondering how you feel about diagnosing characters in novels where the... author might not have known about the diagnosis. And this is, I'm thinking about Mrs. Bennett and potentially having an anxiety disorder, but we've also had people write in, and I think that this is fair, of thinking of Mr. Collins as having autism.

With the new information that we have in the year 2022, which is highly limited information, and I hope when people are listening to this in 100 years, they have more information. But how do you feel about reading a character? with a diagnosis in mind? The academic, like scholarly part of my brain says, don't do it. Like, that's bad. It's a character, not a real person. You know, we only have the information given to us. It also says, especially with psychological...

categories. They're so culturally specific and dependent that I don't even know what it means to see them as translatable across time and space. So there's a part of me that's like, no, don't do that. You know, that's imposition on a different.

kind of writing, fictional writing, and a different time of something that comes from a different place in a different kind of discursive structure so so that like you know the academic amy hollywood would say oh no we're not going to do that the like me as a reader i mean mr collins is autistic is actually pretty interesting i'd never thought of that before

And insofar as we see Austen as representing different kinds of character types that she sees around her and writing these fictions that are satirical. but complexly moral accounts of interactions and interrelations in the social field, like thinking about the ways in which those same character traits might be read very differently in the...

contemporary scene is, I mean, it's kind of, it's interesting. It makes it more complicated for us to share in the moral judgments of the narrator and of the novel, because if you see him as having a condition that is not understood and because it's not understood, mocked or seen as, you know, a moral failing, then that affects how you respond to the character, whether you're identifying with... the character or disidentifying with the character. So I think it matters on all sides, actually.

And it's this interesting thing about what does it mean to think about like representations of autism as having a history that far precedes the diagnosis of autism. And so that sort of changes some of the ways that we can think about what autism. is and how it manifests itself. And Austin in particular, who had a brother who was disabled in a way that we don't know a lot about, but we do know, was deaf. There was a level of compassion that she had in her letters and writing about.

a diagnosis that she understood and that had a name at its time and then potentially didn't have patients for people who didn't have a diagnosis and might have. had that compassion had they had a diagnosis, which. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that seems totally plausible to me. And. I do think I always kind of felt sorry for Mr. Collins because he so doesn't know how to act. He just doesn't.

He just doesn't have the capacity. And so seeing that as something that's related to a diagnosis for someone who doesn't have the capacity actually just rings true to me because I'm like, oh, yeah, there was always that sense of like, oh, you're an asshole, but also like you just don't know what to do. It's almost like you could say it's almost like she intuited something about him that like she didn't have a name for. A close observer. Yeah. Yeah.

Amy, thank you so much for talking to us. And yeah, these are just really thorny issues. And so I'm really grateful that you took the time to walk us through some of them. I'm very happy to be here. And I... I'm not going to think about Mr. Collins the same way. That is courtesy of some of our listeners. Yeah, exactly.

You've been listening to Live from Pemberley. We are a small show, so we need your support to run. Right now, we are running a campaign to try to reach 1,000 patrons. So if you can, please consider supporting us on patreon.com. If you love the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening to us right now. We are a Not Sorry production. Our executive producer is Ariana Nettleman and we are distributed by Acast.

Thanks, as always, to our Jane-level patrons, Viscount, Elise Kanagaratnam of Unicornia, Baroness Cretchen Snigas of Breakfast Carbsten, Knight Molly Reel of Worcestershire Sauce. The Countess of Kristen Hall, Dame Leah B. of Pickleshire, Dame Becky Boo of Tiaralandia, and Duchess Betty Higgins of Bubble Bath.

Thanks this week to Amy Hollywood, Susan Zlotnick, and Claudia Johnson for talking to us. You'll hear more from them throughout our season. Thanks also to Laura Glass, Gabby Iori, AJ Aramas, Julia Argi, Nikki Zoltan, Hannah Rehack. Stephanie Paulsell, and all of our patrons. I think at the end of the season, we need to do a super cut of all the different ways that you pronounce Worcestershire sauce.

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