Transcript
Thomas Magbee (0:09)
Hello and welcome to Classical Stuff youf Should Know, a podcast about books and classical education and Jane Austen. My name is Thomas Magbee. I am joined, as always, by Mr. Graham Donaldson.
Graham Donaldson (0:21)
Hello.
Thomas Magbee (0:21)
And Mr. A.J. hanenberg.
A.J. Hanenberg (0:22)
That's this guy right here.
Thomas Magbee (0:23)
And I already said we're talking about Jane Austen. So this is going to be Pride and Prejudice part two, part three.
Graham Donaldson (0:30)
Have we done a Pride and Prejudice?
Thomas Magbee (0:31)
I think we did. I think we've done one before. Yeah. And that's the only book that she wrote, right? Yeah. So it's the only one that we can talk about. Really excited to dive back in. Take it away, Graham Donaldson.
Graham Donaldson (0:41)
No, today we are going to be talking about Emma.
Thomas Magbee (0:43)
What?
Graham Donaldson (0:45)
And so Emma, novel by Jane Austen and sort of part of a bigger thing. I've been. So I've now taught. I've now read. I haven't read everything Jane Austen's written, but I've read quite a bit. And this is sort of part of my realization that I think Jane Austen is very important. Not only is she just like, no, no, but she's like, really fun to read. But I feel like in terms of.
Thomas Magbee (1:10)
Isn't this like a. Homework's pretty good. Like, what?
Graham Donaldson (1:13)
No, I get. Maybe so. Okay, maybe this is just my own ignorance, because when I was a kid growing up, in my mind, Jane Austen was like the thing your older sister liked that would watch the five hour BBC things and they were just about like girls falling in love. Like, that was the image I had in my mind is that it's just smooching. It's just smooching. It's just like, you know, 19th century romantic comedies. And that was about it. And it was just, you know, cleverly done and beautiful dresses and gardens and romance and that was all there was to it.
Thomas Magbee (1:46)
Yeah.
Graham Donaldson (1:47)
But the more that I've read Jane Austen, I'm sort of developing a little bit of a thesis in my mind of why I think Jane Austen is like just sort of important for everybody to read because it paints a picture of like psychologically healthy people. So this is. So maybe we'll sort of get to this towards the end of the episode. But that's kind of the thesis, my thesis. So, like, if you have, you know, health, health in a body, right? Like there's a thousand ways that a body can go sick. There are a thousand ways that a body can go wrong. You got too much blood, you got not enough blood. You got, you know, too much bile. Not enough bile or whatever. There's all these different ways that a body can go unhealthy. But there is a small sort of band upon which a body is working the way it's supposed to be. And you would call it healthy. And I think definitely this is not just a Graham theory. This is. This. Plato talks about this, this is true also of the soul, that there is a thousand different ways for the soul to go wrong, but there really is kind of just like a narrow band upon which the soul you would consider healthy and happy. And so much of Jane Austen's work is talking about people who are on the road to unhappiness without maybe even realizing it, realizing it and course correcting and going to happiness. And so that's why I think, like, it's. She's very important to read. And also just sort of really interesting that she comes at the beginning of the 19th century, when that century. The 19th century is the century of psychoanalysis and the century of trying to map, you know, the. All of the, The. The. The conditions of the soul or trying to give framework and language to, you know, narcissism and all. Whatever. Whatever the terms are, right. Like the. Freud's coming in and he's trying to give these categories to different kinds of soul maladies. And the reason I've been thinking of Austin in this way is because I've been teaching her in this class this year, and I've paired her with a book that comes towards the end or the latter half of the 19th century. I paired it with Crime and Punishment, which is a real tone shift between the two of them. But the more that I've sort of been. We've been comparing them together in class. The more I realize, like, Dostoyevsky talks about the soul, the sick soul, the. The, like the paranoid narcissist Ras Kolnikov. And all of Jane Austen's characters are these people that have this. Have similar, like, similar kind of tendencies, albeit very small and very like, undeveloped problems, but, you know, if not, if not course corrected, are sort of on the road to unhappiness. And a lot of the characters sort of realize that partway through the book. So that's why I think Jane Austen actually ends up is not just like fluffy romantic comedies, but is really sort of observant and really understands the human soul very well and how it can go wrong and go well. So we're going to be talking about Emma today, and Emma's. The book starts off with kind of like a tip to be reading the book kind of that way. So Emma is a wealthy, beautiful woman, and she's young, 21, and she lives in this little small town where she is pretty much the, like, preeminent girl in town. And she's rich, but she's not like the high aristocrat of town. There's another family called the Knightleys, who are the Knightley. Mr. Knightley, he owns the estate that employs all the farmers. And Mr. Knightley clearly lives in the, like, the big house, the like Downton Abbey house, right. And he is very much the responsible man who is. Is. Is the big aristocrat. And the. Emma Woodhouse is from a smaller aristocratic family that doesn't own land and doesn't have servants and this kind of stuff, but still lives in this beautiful house anyway. She is rich, she was beautiful. And it starts off with this Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. So she has had a life where things have always gone right for her. Now, that's not entirely true. She's lost her mom. Her mother has died, but Emma has borne it well. But on that very first couple of paragraphs, Jane Austen points this out about Emma. The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself. These were the disadvantages which threatened to alloy her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her. So Emma's sins, insofar as what they are, are so, like, sort of small and baby and undeveloped that you, if you bumped into her and met her, you wouldn't be like, oh, gosh, that woman. Like, she doesn't. She is. She is conceited. No, they're so small and undetectable that you wouldn't rank them as misfortunes, but if left sort of unchecked, they could grow and they could develop into something really bad. Anyway, so we're going to sort of briefly chart the story in his broad strokes, and AJ can help fill in the blanks because he's recently read it, too. And then I kind of want to talk a little bit about just sort of like. Like our last episode with the dude in the. Well, Emma kind of has a couple of moments where herself is revealed to herself.