In an ordinary Midwestern suburb is an ordinary two-bedroom house containing an ordinary couple. One of them has a plate of chicken and green beans and the other is kneeling beside him with his hands tied behind his back, opening his mouth to receive a green bean.
Pride and Prejudice is about a family in a much less technologically advanced time of Earth - no computers, no cars, no electricity. Despite what would be fairly clear cues to a modern Earthly reader that not all of the Bennett sisters are definitely submissive, it is assumed that they are because they're girls, and they can't inherit their house; they appear to be of a social class that can't just go get a job, or at least can't just go get most jobs, so one of them has to marry someone rich and support her sisters. In spite of this the narrative is supportive of attempts to find personally suitable doms rather than agreeing to the first financially suitable proposal to come one's way and it's definitely clear on doms being desirable in ways other than the monetary. When Isabella has teatime she tells Thellim where she can find the 2005 film to stream if she'd like another angle on the same plot with more supporting visuals and body language and costuming and whatnot, though she cautions the adaptation is not historically perfect.
Isabella comes home at six with a bag of Chinese takeout and lays it out. "Take whatever you want, I like all of this and will eat whatever you don't," she says.
As of the earlier chapters, Pride and Prejudice is about people who are terribly alone in a world that does not support their existence. With rare or no exceptions, they don't communicate their goals to each other or cooperate in achieving them; they live in a world where every aspect of society is configured harmfully and nobody considers alternative structures for fixing them; the only numbers they use are for money; their goals are simple and uniform and tiny, and poorly pursued even so; nobody ever explicitly invokes any mental skill or thinks about how to think; it does not really seem like they are having fun, nor do they have a goal of obtaining fun, nor any notion that fun is something they are missing...
That's not even the disturbing part.
Pride and Prejudice doesn't do the thing that Thellim thinks a book is meant to do. One of the points of books existing is that you can get deep, true information about the characters' thoughts in a way that is surpassed by only your very closest oath-of-privacy friends in real life. Thellim is getting less information about these character's minds than she expects, less than she'd get from hearing a real person talk on a walkway, and the disturbing thing is the sense that the missing info is not there. With the exception of occasional flashes for Elizabeth, the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in Pride and Prejudice bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.
There's a paragraph that jumped out at her, at the end of Chapter 1: "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his submissive understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news." Thellim is still trying to figure out all the ways this paragraph is deeply disturbing, and has only analyzed some of it. One element, of course, is that the author is - looking down on their characters to a greater extent than it is permissible to look down even on imaginary people. Even if someone's mental skills are objectively, measurably, quantifiably that far below yours, you do not describe them like that. You don't read other people describing them like that. It would not be good for you; it is not done. Readers laugh at Verrez's antics but you never get the impression that Verrez's author thinks of Verrez like - like that. But that's just the lesser problem of morality; the deeper problem of cognition is that the author doesn't seem to think that Mr. Bennet or Mrs. Bennet would notice for themselves what the author believes about them.
There is a half-joking half-serious dath ilani proverb, about all infinite recursions really being only three levels deep; where the serious part is that a lot of human cognitive recursion only goes three levels deep. This book seems to be written as if that number was one, permitting only that the author imagine characters, and not that the author imagine characters who imagine themselves.
Sorry, but this book is also horrifying! In an entirely new and different way from all the other ways Earth is horrifying.
Thellim doesn't complain about any of this to Isabella during teatime, because Thellim has started to notice a model of herself as wilding out about every single aspect of Earth, and isn't comfortable with that. At all, never mind how it probably looks to Isabella. If Thellim were in a book and somebody else were reading that book, they'd already be complaining about the Thellim character being stereotyped in that way. Well, this Thellim character at least aspires to be better than that version of the Thellim character, and is not blind to what anybody reading her book would see.
And if Thellim were writing a novel, she'd bestow self-awareness on her own characters the same way, because otherwise they wouldn't be realistic people. But the entities in Pride and Prejudice aren't like that. It is very visible to Thellim. It is very disturbing. The possibility that maybe actual Earth people could be like this is very very disturbing. But maybe this is more of a young-adult novel meant to illustrate how not to think, and Elizabeth turns into a real person by the time the story ends.
Thellim will not make up a lot of hypotheses about it yet. She will finish this novel and then read at least one other fiction novel first. She's pretty sure that's what her readers would be telling her to do, at this point.
Thellim still hasn't finished reading by the time Isabella comes home, in part because at one point Thellim had to pause to search online for whether Earthlings had talked about themselves being self-aware, or having the property that her language install tries to translate into English as 'consciousness'. It is not yet certain that Thellim's own continued existence is entirely unlike a story in some generalized way; and for some or all Earthlings to lack consciousness could be a clever little plot twist to imply that The Video was surprise! a morally neutral event. Google's answer however was that Earthlings seem very confused about themselves being conscious; they talk about a 'mysterious redness of red', and other phenomena of apparent internal inexplicability that Thellim has grown up thinking about as having perfectly straightforward explanations in terms of what various cognitive algorithms feel like from inside. But Earthlings do seem to be conscious... or at least, some Earthling 'philosophers' were conscious at some point, because where else would the confused essays come from originally, even if others are just imitating them now. That would usually be a wacky thought, but Thellim is worried about all the talk of 'p-zombies' she's come across. It's an obvious thought that if somebody goes around talking about how consciousness has zero causal effects on behavior, perhaps that is because they are not conscious themselves. She couldn't find any experiments on whether being submissive correlates with belief in p-zombies. But if the real premise of this world is that dominants have inner life but not submissives, and that's why submissives can be configured to seek out pain even while they scream from it... well, that's better than the alternative, she supposes. But Thellim would personally rather not live inside that kind of universe.
It doesn't seem likely, though. In real life, there ought to be a drastic difference in behavior, after severing the algorithms underlying the reportable experience of qualia. It's not like Thellim failed to notice that difference for the characters in Pride and Prejudice. And searching for 'cognitive reflection testing' turned up, well, it's sort of horrifying that this test is being given to adults rather than eight-year-olds, but nonetheless there's no 'statistically significant' difference in average scores between doms and subs. Though the fact that Thellim is pretty sure every adult in dath ilan maxes out this test, and Earth does not, is rapidly assuming status as her leading alternative hypothesis for the proximal source of everything wrong with Earth that isn't the magic. Yes, she's trying not to construct theories so quickly, but she can't actually not organize her sense impressions, she can only avoid believing those theories too much and throwing them at Isabella.
She's reading science at the moment Isabella gets in, in fact. It's embarrassing that she was doing that instead of her literary homework. (The thought of quickly tabbing back to the book to hide the evidence never crosses Thellim's mind; dath ilani do ever lie and hide even for small sad reasons but this is not an occasion for that.)
"Thank you," Thellim says to Isabella, and samples some of everything from the Chinese takeout.
There are crab rangoons and shrimp fried rice and beef with broccoli and sweet-and-sour chicken and eggdrop soup. "I don't know how fast you read, did you get through much of Pride and Prejudice?"
"Embarrassingly not far, still, I stopped to search a few things and fell into graphtraps. I am... hopefully not to the good parts yet."
"I mean, it's okay if you don't like it, not everyone's an Austen fan, I don't expect you to finish it if it's not - useful or whatever. Graphtraps?"
"Ideas connected to other ideas in a pattern that you can't escape until somebody else gets you out of it or you need to go to the bathroom. You know the concept even if you don't have a word for it, I've seen Wikipedia." It somehow had not occurred to Thellim that there would be Austen fans, or that this must be a much-beloved book if you recommend it to a stranger from another dimension trying to understand Earth.
Maybe the characters/characterization gets much much less disturbing in later chapters.
"Oh, you went on a Wiki-walk. Had a tabsplosion." Om nom Chinese. "Anything I should be clearing up?"
"I... feel reluctant to burden you with it. I've done too much of that already. I'm mostly hopeful that what I'm reacting to is just a literary convention, on the order of an alien seeing some images from what your people call 'anime' and concluding that Earthlings can't draw and have distorted ideas about physics. Is there fiction meant to depict - real people rather than stylized ones?"
"...there's, uh, historical fiction with some characters who were or are real? What do you mean stylized?"
"I'd have to look it up to remember the exact phrasing but 'She was a submissive who understood little and knew little and had poor impulse control' is not how any dath ilani would ever describe a character, and anybody who had problems resembling that in real life would not be completely oblivious to the fact, and presumably submissives in reality have inner lives that do not entirely revolve around judging doms for suitability - if this book is not in some sense literary anime I will be very disturbed."
"...wow, the implications for dath ilani fiction are sure something. Uh, there are books that spend more time on characters' inner lives, though usually not very many characters per book, some character is nearly always going to be casually drawn and characters in general are not going to, uh... act... dath ilani... about their reasoning habits and self-assessments."
"How reasoning habits and self-assessments look on Earth instead of home is some of the info I need. The parts I'm reading don't have enough detail drawn in to see reasoning habits and self-assessments - does it not seem to you like the characters don't think or act the way real people would? I'm asking from a painter's viewpoint rather than an interpretive viewpoint, one that would look at a stick figure and say 'Those arms are much too thin!' instead of 'Ah, somebody used a straight line to indicate this arm.'"
"The characters don't seem particularly unrealistic to me, I was deliberately avoiding anything with fantasy or sci-fi stuff or weird artistic conventions that might be distracting, but it's possible there are literary behaviors that I'm so used to that they don't stick out to me that you can't interpret at all, which suggests maybe I should be recommending you stuff for kids, which has to be accessible to readers with less experience with our tropes?"
No. She's not giving up hope that fast. You cannot build an industrial civilization out of stick figures like these. "So one of my theories is that this is meant to be something like - humor? Social commentary? Satire? English has words for all of those things so you should know what they are? But I don't understand the baseline and am seeing everything literally so I don't know which parts are meant to satirize?"
"Austen was sure doing some social commentary. Unfortunately people mostly don't write extremely pedestrian literary fiction in which nothing at all is being said about the contents. ...or if they do it's not something I read and therefore not something I can recommend, and/or it has sex scenes which might send you into conniptions. I guess I could tell you which pages to skip to avoid sex scenes in an otherwise very straightforward romance novel."
"Just the fact that it is social commentary at all is much more hopeful than if it was meant to be an adventure that obeys all the generalizations of reality while being somewhat low-probability inside it, like a novel about a successful world-changing startup, say. I ask this in a spirit where you're supposed to be very careful not to let my question influence your answer: would you say that this novel is socially commenting on people with overly narrow goals and who don't reflect on themselves enough?"
"Uh, it's commentary on a social class that existed in that place and time and the constraints it placed on the members' lifestyles and ambitions, which I guess you could put that way if you wanted."
"Right, and the people in that social class did not literally actually really talk and think like that. Austen is exaggerating it so that people can see it more clearly, and I was disturbed by this in much the same way I was initially disturbed by the size of anime eyes relative to anime mouths because no corresponding stylistic convention exists in dath ilan. Not permitting question influence on answer, does that sound right?" Right?? Right???
"I... think you are looking for a degree or kind of unreality that is not supposed to be there."
"- I mean, I'm not going to tell you 'ah, actually Jane Austen was a mindreading psion and based all these characters on real people and her main contribution to the book was her charming prose', she was making stuff up, she was making it legible and interesting to her audience, but I think comparing it to Sailor Moon having eyes the size of dinner plates it's relatively mild, but I may be incorrectly estimating how realistic your cartoons are if you are even allowed to have cartoons, or how, uh, I don't even know what adjective I want, I may have an incorrect model of your novels."
She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people.
Thellim goes back to the computer. Back to Chapter 1. "Sentence one. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single dominant in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a submissive.' Remember your concerns about dath ilani monoculture? If this is actually a universal belief your people would seem like they had to be much, much more unified than ours would be around any social opinion in this class."
"- okay, no, yeah, that's just a blatantly obvious exaggeration to an Earth reader, it means something like 'it is a common stereotype in these environs'. I should be thinking of kids' literature for you, it'll telegraph that sort of thing a touch more clearly."