Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 20
March 9, 2018
Petitioning Beggars and Historical Whitewashing in Austen’s Financial Romance
Sara Malton is the author of Forgery in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (2009), and her work has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Studies, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, the European Romantic Review, and English Studies in Canada. She’s a past Trustee of the Dickens Society, and she hosted the 20th Annual Dickens Society Symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 8-10, 2015.[image error]She wrote a guest post on “Refashioning Memory” for the blog series I hosted a few years ago in honour of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and I’m very happy that she agreed to contribute to my current series, “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Today’s post is excerpted from her article “‘The Visions of Romance Were Over’: Recollections of a Golden Past in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,” published in 2017 in Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, edited by Goran Stanivukovic (317-37), and reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Sara is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Saint Mary’s University where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature. After receiving her PhD in English from the University of Toronto in 2004, she went on to a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University . She joined the Department of English at Saint Mary’s in 2005.
Two crucial texts bookend Northanger Abbey: Thomas Moss’s poem, “The Beggar’s Petition” (1769) and the “manuscript” (or laundry list, as it turns out) accidentally left behind by Eleanor Tilney’s romantic interest. However mundane, the latter, by contrast to the former, tells a tale of economic inclusion—it is an index to ownership, property, and social hierarchy. Yet, taken together, both texts ultimately return us from the financial realm to the realm of romance.
It is in reference to the “Beggar’s Petition,” a well-known ballad often used in recitation lessons, that we first learn of Catherine’s limited powers of recollection, for “Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat” this single poem, and even her younger sister, Sally, could recite it more successfully (Volume 1, Chapter 1). While this seems a playful enough satire on the typical “heroine’s” education, the narrator is careful to underscore the ways that women’s very lives are shaped by the texts they are taught to memorize and memorialize. For as Catherine grew, she “read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives” (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Of course the life of a typical young woman will normally be far from eventful; it is thus little wonder that the golden world of Northanger, with its enchantment and mystery, is so alluring for Catherine.
Yet Northanger Abbey ultimately proves hardly possessed of the gold of the integral kind, but is instead a world of illusion. Once more, a wondrous world of possibility merely covers over the quotidian, textual, financial realm. Turning to Catherine in her chamber at Northanger, we find her before the
high, old-fashioned black cabinet, though in a situation conspicuous enough [that] had never caught her notice before. . . . though there could be nothing really in it, there was something whimsical, it was certainly a very remarkable coincidence! It was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was Japan, black and yellow Japan of the handsomest kind; and as she held her candle, the yellow had very much the effect of gold. (Volume 2, Chapter 6)
Three times (three that magical number of romance) Catherine must try the key before she can open the cabinet (whose various empty drawers render it as much an empty cash register as a repository of exquisite secrets). Therein she at last finds “a roll of paper,” “the precious manuscript” (Volume 2, Chapter 6). In this manuscript matters of fortune and fact miraculously converge; such a convergence informs the very language of Austen’s free indirect discourse here, as Catherine ponders over “The manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning’s prediction,” and marvels, “how was it to be accounted for?” (Volume 2, Chapter 6; my emphasis).
To Catherine’s great disappointment, the manuscript has far more to do with matters of accountancy than she would have imagined. While she hopes it will grant her access to a gothic past, it proves merely a record of very recent, very dry domestic history: “for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size and much less than she had supposed to it to be at first. . . . An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand” (Volume 2, Chapter 7). There are but four further such bills, along with a receipt for hair powder and soap, and a farrier’s bill. Such records of plain, objective fact serve as a humiliating counter to Catherine’s desire to uncover a vivid history long concealed.
For there are, then, no dirty secrets here, apart from that daily grime of which a male consumer has had to rid himself, its costs documented in but “coarse and modern characters.” This description echoes the narrator’s earlier characterization of the kind of writing one finds in such publications as the Spectator. Both sorts of texts are but mere inventories of the pedestrian. The laundry list and inventories of consumer goods should remind Catherine of the everyday domestic realities that were actually to be found in the Abbey, where, to her great disappointment, “The furniture was in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste” (Volume 2, Chapter 5).
That the manuscripts are but records of laundering or “whitewashing,” we might say, signals how such texts provocatively concentrate the multiple concerns of what I would term Austen’s financial romance. For, as the OED tells us, the verb to whitewash means not only “to make a fabric lighter or whiter; to bleach,” or “to cover or coat a wall or building with whitewash,” but also, in the sense that we now may more readily assume, the act of rewriting or tempering a history, as in “to conceal the faults or errors of; to free from blame.” Yet there is an additional meaning of the term that, although now rare, notably emerged in the late-eighteenth century and underscores the crucial role these washing bills play in the romantic and financial resolution of Catherine’s plot: in 1761 “to whitewash” was first noted as meaning “to clear (a person) from liability for his or her debts, especially by judicial declaration of bankruptcy; to write off (a debt, etc.).” An 1819 issue of Sporting Magazine, for instance, reports on “Two baronets’ sons pleading to be white-washed, but remanded for frauds toward their creditors.”
Ironically for readers, in retrospect we come to realize the importance of such texts and their place in remedying any liabilities in Catherine’s financial history and in securing her profitable romantic and financial future. As it turns out, this “laundry list” in fact bears far more than the residue of dull domestic dealings, but both contains a trace of Eleanor’s romantic history and anticipates the novel’s romantic conclusion—it has far more, therefore, to do with Catherine’s fate than she realizes. As Mary Poovey argues with regard to Austen’s fiction, “by making the money plot first disrupt, then be absorbed by the domestic plot, Austen translates a monetary debt into mutual love” (Genres of the Credit Economy [2008]). So it is here. The “man of fortune and consequence” (Volume 2, Chapter 16) who rather magically transforms Eleanor into his Viscountess at the novel’s conclusion is not a fictitious Byronic hero, but a “real” man possessed of his share of dirty laundry. This man, the narrator reveals, “was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing-bills, resulting from a long visit at Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures” (Volume 2, Chapter 16).
As well as a record of domestic accounts, the list reminds us of what greatly informs the basis of marriage: matters financial, domestic, and, often, pedestrian. Our narrator knows what our heroine does not—that the seemingly slightest of texts (rather like Austen’s own domestic fiction, her self-proclaimed “little bit . . . of ivory on which [she] work[s] with so fine a brush” [December 1816]) and indeed, those bound up with both domestic matters and matters of the heart, may have far more historical import than literally meets the eye. In this manner the novel argues for the way that apparently trivial, marginal texts of the past in fact form a significant part of the historical record. The laundry list’s significance tells us that history is only superficially a tale of men’s financial transactions. Simultaneously it is much more. Austen’s trivial texts underscore the prominence of the financial record, yet also illustrate that those domestic concerns largely occluded from dominant narratives of history are in fact absolutely fundamental to its realization.
We recall that only Eleanor remembers that Catherine may have insufficient funds to see her through her journey away from the Abbey; this crucial moment of female financial guardianship recurs in the novel’s conclusion when Eleanor’s prosperous marriage sufficiently assuages her father’s temper in order for him to submit to the union between Henry and Catherine. Indeed, the violent intrusion of the economic in Northanger Abbey’s world of romance and enchantment is countered by the very intrusion that finally concludes it: Henry’s visit to Catherine at Fullerton. Recalling the frequent compression characteristic of Austen’s endings, such as that of Sense and Sensibility, the dashing hero’s arrival at the heroine’s humbler abode dramatizes the leveling process that the novel’s marital conclusion will in part bring about. Giving the last word, thus, to romance, the power of the landed Viscount trumps the evil actions of the General. Of course, in a final irony, this apparent triumph of conservatism enables the violation of conventional class-based relations—the “filial disobedience” (Volume 2, Chapter 16) that the young couple’s union represents. Like them, readers of Austen—and the realist novel to come—are certainly all the richer for the romance.
Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by James Kinsley and John Davie and with an introduction by Claudia L. Johnson (2003), and the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).
Twelfth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Kim Wilson, Dan Macey, and Laaleen Sukhera.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
March 2, 2018
Bless Me, Henry Tilney, for I Have Sinned
I was hoping Margaret C. Sullivan would write about Henry Tilney for my blog series celebrating 200 years of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and I’m delighted that she said yes. Maggie is the author of The Jane Austen Handbook and Jane Austen Cover to Cover and she has contributed to the anthologies Jane Austen Made Me Do It and The Joy of Jane. For my blog series “Emma in the Snow” she wrote about “Miss Bates in Fairy-land,” and for my Mansfield Park series she analyzed “The Manipulations of Henry and Mary Crawford.”
She is the Editrix of AustenBlog.com and the creator of Mollands.net. She spends her days as the web content manager for a large international law firm and her evenings “watching ‘base ball’ and thinking up adventures for Henry and Catherine that I swear I will write someday.”
Thank you to Sarah for her invitation to participate in this online event, and the opportunity to discuss my favorite Jane Austen character, and even defend him against what I consider to be mistaken impressions. (And we always want to guard against first, ill-considered impressions, don’t we, Janeites?)
There is a persistent idea that I often hear and read about Henry Tilney: that he lectures Catherine Morland, that he is condescending to her, even in some more extreme statements that he is an example of toxic masculinity. This of course is nonsense; nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Henry empowers Catherine to learn to trust her own very good instincts. He sees the generosity and goodness of her heart early on. In fact, I think that is what makes him fall in love with her, along with, as the Authoress herself points out, that Catherine so obviously likes him, but that is a subject for another essay.
I know that many reading this, knowing me as the internet’s premier defender of Da Man (as I named Henry Tilney many years ago, because HE IS DA MAN), are rolling their eyes and saying, “There goes Mags off about Tilney again.” There is, perhaps, a suspicion that I might be a trifle biased. But I have thought about this subject, paraphrasing another Austen hero, more than most women, and I have no reason to reverse my original position on Mr. Tilney. He is Jane Austen’s wittiest, most intelligent, best-read, and most delightful hero, and he is entirely sympathetic to women. He is a wonderful brother, and I think will be a wonderful husband, too. Much of the expression of my Tilney-love online might be a trifle tongue-in-cheek, but my sincere admiration for Henry Tilney that started on my first read of Northanger Abbey has continued to this day more than twenty years later. (And I didn’t admire Catherine Morland at all at first—I thought the delightful Henry could do so much better—but I’ve come to love her as Henry himself has, by seeing her through his eyes.)
As an example of this widespread misunderstanding about Henry Tilney, I’d like to discuss the scene in which Henry encounters Catherine exiting his mother’s room at Northanger Abbey, which happens in Volume 2, Chapter 9.
Many interpretations of this scene portray Henry as angry and hectoring. The film versions of the novel may lead to this perception. In the 1980s BBC version, Henry (Peter Firth) enters his mother’s room waving a riding crop and pointing at Catherine (Katharine Schlesinger) with it. As he says his lines, he advances on Catherine menacingly, nearly whispering his lines, backing her up; the camera is often on an extreme close-up of his face, his eyes wide, making him look a little scary.
In the more recent version from 2007, Henry (JJ Feild) also advances menacingly on Catherine (Felicity Jones), his mood ranging between anger and disbelief and back to anger again. For some of his lines, the point of view originates from behind Catherine, below her left ear, pointing up at Henry and making him seem taller and more menacing. In both cases, Henry is portrayed as a hovering, dangerous, dare I say Montonian, presence.
But I don’t see the scene that way. Let’s examine it. (Pray forgive the long passages—Jane Austen’s words convey the scenes better than any paraphrase.)
As soon as she enters the late Mrs. Tilney’s room, Catherine knows that her Gothic novel-fueled runaway imagination has steered her wrongly.
On tiptoe she entered; the room was before her; but it was some minutes before she could advance another step. She beheld what fixed her to the spot and agitated every feature.—She saw a large, well-proportioned apartment, an handsome dimity bed, arranged as unoccupied with an housemaid’s care, a bright Bath stove, mahogany wardrobes and neatly-painted chairs, on which the warm beams of a western sun gaily poured through two sash windows! Catherine had expected to have her feelings worked, and worked they were. Astonishment and doubt first seized them; and a shortly succeeding ray of common sense added some bitter emotions of shame. She could not be mistaken as to the room; but how grossly mistaken in everything else! … She was sick of exploring, and desired but to be safe in her own room, with her own heart only privy to its folly; and she was on the point of retreating as softly as she had entered, when the sound of footsteps, she could hardly tell where, made her pause and tremble. To be found there, even by a servant, would be unpleasant; but by the General, (and he seemed always at hand when least wanted,) much worse!—She listened—the sound had ceased; and resolving not to lose a moment, she passed through and closed the door. At that instant a door underneath was hastily opened; some one seemed with swift steps to ascend the stairs, by the head of which she had yet to pass before she could gain the gallery. She had no power to move. With a feeling of terror not very definable, she fixed her eyes on the staircase, and in a few moments it gave Henry to her view. “Mr. Tilney!” she exclaimed in a voice of more than common astonishment. He looked astonished too. “Good God!” she continued, not attending to his address, “how came you here?—how came you up that staircase?”
“How came I up that staircase!” he replied, greatly surprized. “Because it is my nearest way from the stable-yard to my own chamber; and why should I not come up it?”
Catherine recollected herself, blushed deeply, and could say no more. He seemed to be looking in her countenance for that explanation which her lips did not afford. …
“…My mother’s room is very commodious, is it not? Large and cheerful-looking, and the dressing closets so well disposed! It always strikes me as the most comfortable apartment in the house, and I rather wonder that Eleanor should not take it for her own. She sent you to look at it, I suppose?”
“No.”
“It has been your own doing entirely?”—Catherine said nothing—After a short silence, during which he had closely observed her, he added, “As there is nothing in the room in itself to raise curiosity, this must have proceeded from a sentiment of respect for my mother’s character, as described by Eleanor, which does honour to her memory. The world, I believe, never saw a better woman. But it is not often that virtue can boast an interest such as this. The domestic, unpretending merits of a person never known, do not often create that kind of fervent, venerating tenderness which would prompt a visit like yours. Eleanor, I suppose, has talked of her a great deal?”
“Yes, a great deal. That is—no, not much, but what she did say, was very interesting. Her dying so suddenly,” (slowly, and with hesitation it was spoken,) “and you—none of you being at home—and your father, I thought—perhaps had not been very fond of her.”
“And from these circumstances,” he replied (his quick eye fixed on her’s), “you infer perhaps the probability of some negligence—some—(involuntarily she shook her head)—or it may be—of something still less pardonable.” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)
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“Good God! How came you up that staircase?” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Henry picks up pretty quickly what is going on. He knows Catherine’s enjoyment of Gothic novels, and his quick mind makes the connection between the romance of an ancient, though refurbished, abbey—indeed, he told Catherine a silly story on the way to Northanger based on that knowledge—and he realizes she has taken it too far.
Throughout the novel, when Catherine applies to Henry for knowledge, with her charming combination of naivete and lack of guile, he has employed the Socratic method with her. Instead of telling her what to think or do, he asks a series of questions designed to make her think for herself and learn to trust her instincts. Catherine does have good instincts—she initially dislikes John Thorpe, for example, but does not trust this feeling. He is her brother’s friend! He is Isabella’s brother! She, Catherine, must be wrong about him. Of course she is quite correct, but she hasn’t yet learned to trust her instincts. Henry seems to realize this, and attempts to help her grow and learn, to question that which should be questioned. (It is possible that he already has performed the same service for the self-possessed, mature Eleanor, who might not always have been that way.) He does the same in this scene.
“But your father,” said Catherine, “was he afflicted?”
“For a time, greatly so. You have erred in supposing him not attached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible for him to—We have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition—and I will not pretend to say that while she lived, she might not often have had much to bear, but though his temper injured her, his judgment never did. His value of her was sincere; and, if not permanently, he was truly afflicted by her death.” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)
Here, Henry is imparting facts to Catherine. That is different from lecturing, and his tone is matter-of-fact. He even admits, knowing that Catherine has spent time with General Tilney, that the General lacks “tenderness of disposition.” He does not attempt to deny something she has had the opportunity to observe for herself. To do so certainly would have been condescending.
“I am very glad of it,” said Catherine; “it would have been very shocking!”—
“If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” (Volume 2, Chapter 9)
He knows what she is implying, and he is surprised, certainly. Is he angry? Perhaps a little, but I don’t get a sense of that from the paragraph above, and he is definitely not menacing or malicious. Henry does not lecture Catherine. He encourages her to use her common sense and her good instincts, which he knows she has, to look into her heart and understand the truth. He points out that they are not characters in one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels—”Remember that we are English, that we are Christians”—by which he means Protestants, of course, rather than the French and Italian Roman Catholics who people The Mysteries of Udolpho, whose religion, from a good Protestant viewpoint, contains elements of superstition that a reasonable person would not entertain (a viewpoint Mrs. Radcliffe herself would have supported).
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. (Volume 2, Chapter 9)
I suspect this is where many readers get their annoyance with Henry. He yelled at her and made her cry! No, not really. He does not yell, or lecture, or hector. He is gentle. He calls her Dearest Miss Morland. Catherine is not crying because Henry is mad at her. She is crying because she is ashamed of herself. “Tears of shame.” It’s right in the text, as are so many things with Jane Austen when you look for them.
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A Signet Classic edition from the 2010s.
But don’t just take my word for it. A real history and literature scholar has written most eloquently about this scene and offered a tremendous analysis. In her essay “The Rev. Henry Tilney, Rector of Woodston” (Persuasions 20 [1998]), Irene Collins writes of Henry Tilney as an Anglican priest. (Something else people think about Henry Tilney is that he is a lousy priest. Go read that essay and be disabused of that notion forever.) Professor Collins was an expert on the Anglican clergy of Jane Austen’s time—her book Jane Austen and the Clergy is required reading for those seeking to understand the clergymen of Jane Austen’s novels, who are not a homogenous bunch at all. In this essay, she opines that in the scene from Northanger Abbey excerpted above, Henry is actually acting in his capacity as an Anglican priest by helping Catherine understand the “secret sin” she has committed. Jane Austen, in the prayers published after her death, asks for assistance with these secret sins. Prof. Collins writes,
Secret sins were described at some length by Jane Austen’s favorite sermon writer, Archbishop Thomas Sherlock. In a discourse entitled “On self-examination,” he listed them as “sins committed in ignorance, sins we have fallen into through habit, and sins we have simply forgotten.” Though seemingly trivial, they may have done harm to others without one’s knowledge; thinking ill of a fellow creature was particularly mentioned. Hence, Sherlock warned, “for every idle word, how soon soever it slips from our memory, for every vain imagination of the heart, how soon soever it vanishes away, we shall give an account on the day of judgement” (Knox 276-80). To avoid so serious a climax we should review our conduct at the end of each day and ask God to forgive whatever he had seen amiss in it. Jane Austen clearly took this advice to heart. In each of the prayers she wrote for family use at Chawton, there are petitions asking God’s forgiveness for secret sins. Indeed, they are the only kind of sin she mentions.
This certainly applies to Catherine’s “sin” against General Tilney, of considering him a possible murderer or wife-abuser. The Anglican church had done away with confession before a priest, as Prof. Collins’ essay points out, but confession as a private conference with God was important, and the steps remain the same: examine your conscience, understand you have sinned, repent the sin, and promise to sin no more, upon which the sin is forgiven and removed from your spiritual permanent record. Henry, by asking Catherine a series of questions as he does, is assisting her to examine her conscience and understand her secret sin, which before encountering him she had already decided to forget about. He is acting as a good priest should.
The part of about repentance comes in Chapter 10. Well, it starts at the end of the scene already described, when Catherine runs away with tears of shame. Not tears of sorrow, because she thinks her chances with Henry are gone forever, though she does; not tears of terror because he berated her, because he didn’t; but tears of shame. In the following chapter, the narrator tells us,
The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done. Most grievously was she humbled. Most bitterly did she cry. It was not only with herself that she was sunk—but with Henry. Her folly, which now seemed even criminal, was all exposed to him, and he must despise her forever. The liberty which her imagination had dared to take with the character of his father, could he ever forgive it? The absurdity of her curiosity and her fears, could they ever be forgotten? She hated herself more than she could express. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)
The conscience has been examined; the sin discovered, admitted, and repented; and she has determined to not commit the same sin again.
She did not learn either to forget or defend the past; but she learned to hope that it would never transpire farther, and that it might not cost her Henry’s entire regard. Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing could shortly be clearer, than that it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion, each trifling circumstance receiving importance from an imagination resolved on alarm, and every thing forced to bend to one purpose by a mind which, before she entered the Abbey, had been craving to be frightened. She remembered with what feelings she had prepared for a knowledge of Northanger. She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged. …
Her mind made up on these several points, and her resolution formed, of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense, she had nothing to do but to forgive herself and be happier than ever…. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)
Despite the narrator’s light tone, this is not a small point. This is Catherine’s “Till this moment, I never knew myself.” She is learning throughout the novel, but this is the biggest lesson she learns. And who has taught her—or, more properly, led her to enlightenment? Henry Tilney; who, by the way, lets Catherine know that her sin has been expunged and forgotten:
The formidable Henry soon followed her into the room, and the only difference in his behaviour to her was that he paid her rather more attention than usual. Catherine had never wanted comfort more, and he looked as if he was aware of it. … Henry’s astonishing generosity and nobleness of conduct, in never alluding in the slightest way to what had passed, was of the greatest assistance to her…. (Volume 2, Chapter 10)
The spiritual slate has been wiped clean. Go forth, Catherine, and sin no more.
I hope that the readers who have hung in there with this long essay will view Henry Tilney in future more generously, as Henry himself acted with Catherine Morland. As you re-read the novel, pay attention to his interactions with Catherine. They range from nonsensical semi-flirtation (when they first meet at the Lower Rooms) to big-brotherish teasing (the walk at Beechen Cliff) to concerned friend (when he advises her about her reservations about Isabella and Captain Tilney), and, so often, are in the form of an engaged series of questions, either to draw her out or to lead her to knowledge. He listens to her. That’s more than her own family and so-called friends ever do.
Henry pays Catherine the compliment of not dumbing down his conversation, and he does not condescend to her; indeed, I would say that Henry and his sister Eleanor are the only characters in Northanger Abbey who do not condescend to Catherine, or worse yet, attempt to hoodwink her. Though he often fills the role of a teacher, the only thing Henry lectures Catherine about is the picturesque. Unlike many other Janeites, I have no doubt that Henry and Catherine will have the happiest of marriages, and that he will not grow tired of her, especially as she blossoms under his care into a fully formed adult and develops the confidence that being thoroughly understood, loved, and appreciated gives every woman.
Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye (2006).
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A Penguin edition from the 1970s.
Eleventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Sara Malton, Kim Wilson, and Dan Macey.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
February 23, 2018
Riot!—what riot?
Judith Thompson contributed a guest post on the adoption plot of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for the blog series I hosted in 2014, and it’s my pleasure to introduce her guest post on Northanger Abbey for “Youth and Experience,” the series I’m hosting this year in honour of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Judith is General Secretary and archivist of the John Thelwall Society, and she’s a leader in the field of Thelwall Studies. Author of four books and editions by or about this romantic radical and polymath, as well as numerous articles and chapters, she’s currently writing the first full biography of Thelwall, as part of Raising Voices: The Legacy of Citizen John Thelwall, an archival-activist project that seeks to restore his lost legacy and connect his voice to communities that still struggle to realize the democratic rights and liberties for which he fought.
Judith is Professor of Romantic Literature at Dalhousie University, and this year she’s on sabbatical. Earlier this week, she arrived in the Lake District for the Wordsworth Winter School. The photos she posted on Facebook were so lovely that I asked her if I could share a few of them here as well.
“My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand?—And you, Miss Morland—my stupid sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her stupidity. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general.” (Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 14)
This passage, in which Henry coolly corrects Catherine and Eleanor’s overheated imaginations by mansplaining the difference between reality and fiction, is one of my favorites in Northanger Abbey. This is not just because this episode so neatly encapsulates the conflicts at the heart of the novel, and Austen so cleverly outdoes Henry’s rather pushy, self-satisfied wit with her own quiet but much more complex and devastating irony. Rather, it is because the mention of riots in London makes it the best place in Austen’s corpus to enter a discussion about the nature and degree of Austen’s political consciousness and her engagement with one of the most revolutionary critical moments in literary history, which she is often accused of, or assumed to be, ignoring. These much-vexed debates have been rekindled lately with the publication of Helena Kelley’s much ballyhooed book on Jane Austen: The Secret Radical. As a specialist in romantic-era radicalism, currently at work on a biography of its most outspoken representative and hero, John Thelwall, I was eager to read her book, and see how its arguments for Austen’s secret radicalism might compare with my own. I was, shall we say, disappointed.
This is not the place for a full review of Kelley’s work, which has been critiqued by abler pens than mine. But like others, I suspect she has not only overlooked the already copious criticism on Austen and politics, but cannot have read the books carefully, since she pays absolutely no attention to this passage, which might have been a test case for her argument, and also seems unaware or uninterested in Austen’s irony, dismissing it as mere jokiness. In place of real, historically-, critically- and technically-informed analysis of radicalism, she substitutes a breathlessly superficial revelation of sexual symbolism (masturbation by the washing-chest, oh my!) in a tone that mimics Isabella’s prurient faux-naïveté, without the saving grace of Catherine’s sincerity. Despite her title, Kelley shows little awareness of the subtle and multiple forms that radicalism takes in the period, or the reasons why a woman in particular might have had recourse to secrecy in an age (like our own) of ideological binaries that forced many intelligent thinkers into silence (clue: it’s not all about sex).
Leaving Kelley behind, then, let me look more closely at this passage. And notice, as anyone with any sense of history and awareness of Austen’s irony must understand, that Eleanor and Catherine are NOT at all wrong or naïve to be worried about civil and military upheaval in London. On the contrary, at the time of the novel’s original composition, as well as of its publication 20 years later, such worries were realistic and widespread, whichever political stripe one might wear. In 1798, under the threat of French invasion, naval mutinies, rebellion in Ireland, crackdowns on political dissent and the widespread use of spies and informers, the nation had riot on the brain, and the government might be said to have survived by cultivating it; in 1817, in the wake of the Spa Fields Riots and the Pentrich rising, and just before Peterloo, visions of mobs attacking, banks attacked and city streets flowing with the blood of insurgents and dragoons alike were matters for daily discussion in the morning newspaper. It is not Catherine and Eleanor, but Henry, who is being naïve. Or is he? After all, it was Henry who introduced the idea of politics in the first place, immediately before this passage; the discussion on their walk having descended from the picturesque possibilities of “a withered oak … to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands, and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.” That silence is broken by Catherine, who merely picks up the same topic by introducing rumours of what might occur in London. In the discussion that follows Eleanor takes a law-and-order position, asserting that if subversive designs are known beforehand, “Proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by government to prevent its coming to effect,” while Henry takes a more anarchic (dare I say radical) stance that “government … neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters,” caring nothing for murder. So is Henry being politically provocative, testing for loyalty or solidarity? or is he only flirting, teasing the girls about their ignorance of politics? Well of course he is flirting, but the ambiguity raises questions about his ideological position, and how we can tell; about how much young women should and did know about politics in the age of treason trials and Peterloo; about whose political interests were served by naïveté; about whether the Gothic offered an escape from or a means of confronting, the romantic culture of fear. And overarching all these questions, we must ask how radical Austen is, especially since the double-edged irony that she perfects and deploys with such precision yet ideological uncertainty is precisely the technique used by radicals themselves, who frequently turned to literature, including both Gothic and mock-Gothic forms, in order to say what could not be said openly, safely playing both sides of the fence to avoid prosecution for sedition.
Austen’s irony, walking the fine line between sedition and entertainment, is a more likely sign of the secret radicalism of Northanger Abbey than her sexual symbolism. Yet the elusive nature of such radical discourse, and the difficulty of distinguishing it from its anti-Jacobin mirror-image, makes it difficult to pin anyone down, and Austen has been claimed by both sides before. We cannot simply assume that her rural gentility made her conservative, any more than we can assume that Henry’s military family did. As in all times of civil and cold war (and the romantic period came close to both), allegiances are mixed and identities fluid. But here, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, John Thelwall offers a useful index, or at least an intertext, since he is definitely a radical, the most visible, notorious and persevering radical of the romantic period; while he may have moderated his views slightly over his long career, he never changed or disclaimed his principles: constitutional reform, democratic equality, universal suffrage, social justice, the rights of man (and woman). Furthermore, intersections between his writings and activities and the plot, imagery and dates of composition and publication of Northanger Abbey offer a useful context for understanding (though perhaps not in the end resolving) the question of Austen’s secret radicalism.
In 1797, shortly before Austen began Northanger Abbey, Thelwall took a Pedestrian Excursion from London that ended at Bath, where he took in the scenic prospect at the very location that prompts Henry’s lesson in the political picturesque. The motive and aim of his excursion was to combine “a passion for picturesque and romantic landscape with a heart throbbing with anxiety for the human race and the history and actual condition of the laborious classes.” Just before Bath he visited Old Sarum, a famous “rotten borough” that invited commentary on inclosure, waste lands, crown lands, and government, such as Henry (possibly) offers (and Thelwall certainly does). Shortly after this, Thelwall indulges some characteristic mockery of the Gothic with scathing comments on a convent in Amesbury (a mansion rather than an abbey, but equally marked by “barbarous Gothic” carvings and cornices,) where “young, inexperienced” women are “kidnapped into bondage,” chaining their consciences with oaths that “prohibit the progress of enquiry” and “annihilate the free agency of reason.”
By late 1817, when Austen’s novel was published, some of these radical Wollstonecraftian ideas about rational education and freedom of speech in women, had become a staple of the public lectures on elocution, history, poetry and drama that Thelwall had been offering for 15 years, replacing his earlier, more explicitly radical political lectures. Two of his regular subjects were the history of female education and the superiority of the female voice; he inveighed against superficialities of “accomplishment,” drew attention to historical heroines like Lucretia and Hersilia, and included recitations from women writers like Barbauld. In his Institution for Elocution and Oratory in London he trained and promoted actresses, treated cases of speech impediment and offered a full education for women as well as men. He offered his lectures throughout Britain, including Southampton, Winchester, and especially frequently, Bath; by the mid teens he was a charismatic celebrity and they were a staple form of entertainment, very popular among women, especially in the middle class to which Austen belonged.
I do not mean to suggest that Austen ever attended these lectures or read his Pedestrian Excursion, or is referencing Thelwall explicitly in any way. What I do want to show is that she could have; she was certainly as well-informed and politically aware as any other man or woman of the era; and there is nothing in what she does or says that might not also have been done or said by the notorious Mr. Thelwall, and vice versa.
In the end, I think, the best guide to deciding or decoding Austen’s “secret radicalism” is her use of irony. And perhaps it is here that the measuring her against Thelwall is most useful. For one of Thelwall’s most significant contributions to literature is the development of a style he calls “seditious allegory”: a form of discourse that exploits ambiguity, irony and the instability of language, originally to avoid prosecution for sedition by making it impossible for readers to pin down his meaning, but more broadly, to add complexity and improve the English language, which was the explicit object of his elocutionary lectures. The multiple ironies, puns and parodies in his fables and comic ballads, as in his lectures and his Jacobin novel, are directed at social critique, but they also offer a training in interpretation that encouraged readers to enquire, to become aware of complexities moral and discursive, and to judge for themselves as informed citizens. Now anti-Jacobin novels also use irony, and as I have already noted, they are sometimes hard to distinguish from Jacobin novels. However, the aim of the irony is different. Irony in the anti-Jacobin novel is usually directed at the excess idealism of Jacobin characters, showing how it is misplaced at best, and at worst hypocritical. With a few notable exceptions, its narrative tends to be quite preachy and obvious; its aim is definitely ideological; it has little interest in education except to encourage stability and the status quo. But in the best Jacobin novels (and I would include Thelwall’s single novel among these) the aim of the irony is not ideology but enquiry; they destabilize and subvert not simply in order to mock their opponents, but in order to raise consciousness, and foster enquiry.
If, as Margaret Atwood has recently said, “the aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity,” then the radical Jacobin novelist, like Thelwall, does the opposite. He fosters ambiguity in order to educate the reader. By that definition, I am proud to claim Jane Austen as a true radical, no longer wrapped in secrecy.
Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Northanger Abbey (1995).
Tenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret C. Sullivan, Sara Malton, and Dan Macey.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
February 16, 2018
Parental Tyranny and Filial Disobedience in Northanger Abbey
Theresa M. Kenney says she’s “an Austenite by accident”: “I fell in love with Austen after being pressured to read her when I was an undergraduate English and Classics Major at Penn State by my graduate student friends, and when I moved to Texas to teach at the University of Dallas, I was hired as a Medievalist and Early Modernist. However, I was assigned the senior novel seminar when an older colleague was diagnosed with cancer, and taught that class for five years, advising almost 200 senior theses, and teaching Emma repeatedly every spring near the beginning of the syllabus. Then a graduate student begged for a class in Jane Austen, a writer not in favor amongst the builders of our curriculum. I offered the first Austen seminar ever at the university, a class that continues to be enormously popular over ten years later. From that seminar sprang not only that initial student, Joyce Tarpley’s, dissertation on Mansfield Park, now a book, but many student JASNA essay awards, and at least a dozen student publications, among which most recently is Kathryn Davis’s wonderful book, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”
For my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, Theresa wrote about “Emma’s Regency Christmas,” and I’m glad she’s back to write about parental tyranny and filial disobedience for the current series, “Youth and Experience.” Her books include Women Are Not Human: An Anonymous Treatise and Responses. She’s on sabbatical this year, which she says “will allow me both to look after my two little girls (including superintending the education of my own ten-year-old version of Catherine Morland) and to complete two books, one on the Holy Grail, and another on Jane Austen’s sense of an ending.”
On the strength of this, the general, soon after Eleanor’s marriage, permitted his son to return to Northanger, and thence made him the bearer of his consent, very courteously worded in a page full of empty professions to Mr. Morland. The event which it authorized soon followed: Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled; and, as this took place within a twelvemonth from the first day of their meeting, it will not appear, after all the dreadful delays occasioned by the general’s cruelty, that they were essentially hurt by it. To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced that the general’s unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps rather conducive to it, by improving their knowledge of each other, and adding strength to their attachment, I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 2, Chapter 16)
Does the author recommend parental tyranny or reward filial disobedience in Northanger Abbey? The novel rather hastily ends with Jane Austen’s usual method of panning out from the participants in the action to a wider, more general view of the drama that has just played out and a subtle sally, telling the moral of the story with tongue in cheek. The final chapter begins with the Morlands’ balking only at the General’s forbidding of the marriage before granting their own consent. Austen reminds us that they are the mildest and most unsuspicious of parents; moreover, they know the general has done their daughter a wrong that some might consider unforgivable. Nonetheless, they sustain the view that a parent’s consent is necessary.
To what extent is Henry, already in his majority and already in charge of a parish, compelled to obey his father or obtain his blessing for his marriage? Austen says clearly: “There was but one obstacle, in short, to be mentioned; but till that one was removed, it must be impossible for them to sanction the engagement. Their tempers were mild, but their principles were steady, and while his parent so expressly forbade the connection, they could not allow themselves to encourage it. That the general should come forward to solicit the alliance, or that he should even very heartily approve it, they were not refined enough to make any parading stipulation; but the decent appearance of consent must be yielded, and that once obtained—and their own hearts made them trust that it could not be very long denied—their willing approbation was instantly to follow. His consent was all that they wished for.”
Principle requires that the parents of the bride refrain from granting their consent to the marriage if even one parent of the groom disapproves. What is that principle?
In this final chapter Austen is balancing her own need for drama—a final obstacle to be overcome before the happy union of Catherine and Henry—with an investigation into a problem that concerned her throughout her career, even up to Persuasion. At what age does a child cease to have an obligation to obey parents? When does filial obligation cease to be the “primary directive”?
In all the novels she wrote, Austen makes applying to the parent for permission to marry the child an important step. One would think with Mrs. Bennet’s eagerness to marry off her daughters in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, consent would be a foregone conclusion, but Austen typically turns to such moments for drama specifically because the conclusion is not foregone, and even in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennet might withhold his consent from the union of Darcy and Elizabeth—as he does conclusively in the case of Mr. Collins’s proposal. In Northanger Abbey, Mr. and Mrs. Morland at first withhold their consent, not because they dislike Henry, not because they are angry at the general, but because the general has a right to forbid his son to marry the lady he has chosen, the lady who has accepted his proposal.
Even Henry and Catherine do not resent the necessary separation the general’s angry stubbornness enforces upon them: “The young people could not be surprised at a decision like this. They felt and they deplored—but they could not resent it; and they parted…. Henry returned to what was now his only home, to watch over his young plantations, and extend his improvements for her sake, to whose share in them he looked anxiously forward; and Catherine remained at Fullerton to cry.”
Henry does not go home to Northanger; this is not because Henry chooses not to return, but because his father forbids it. Henry has already earned his hero credits with the reader by his angry defiance of the general, but he does not increase them by direct disobedience after the Morlands lay down the law. In fact, in a touching moment of the narrative, Austen depicts him remodeling his house to Catherine’s taste, looking forward “anxiously” to her living there while all the while thinking the general’s will is unalterable. Catherine’s tears attest to her desire to be with him. They want to be with each other but they remain apart: why? Because Catherine, a minor, is legally obligated to obey her parents, and they in principle will not defy the general’s ban on the marriage.
It is interesting that the Morlands do allow Catherine to receive letters from Henry, as we are informed subtly: “Whether the torments of absence were softened by a clandestine correspondence, let us not inquire. Mr. and Mrs. Morland never did—they had been too kind to exact any promise; and whenever Catherine received a letter, as, at that time, happened pretty often, they always looked another way.” Henry and Catherine’s engagement may be informal as long as his father withholds consent, but it is enough for the Morlands that the two are sincerely committed. However, other, more proper, parents might not have allowed it. Austen often uses as a plot device the understood impropriety of letter writing between unmarried persons: in Emma, between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill; in Mansfield Park, between Henry Crawford, using his sister as his proxy, and Fanny Price (and also between Edmund and Fanny, but that is more of a gray area). In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne writes to Willoughby, although they are not engaged, but her doing so seems proof that they are to her family and others. And even in Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy writes to Elizabeth Bennet after her refusal; Darcy justifies his writing of the letter and attempts to keep any word of affection out of it, but it is still a breach of etiquette, although in this case it is not direct disobedience to a parent.
Other parents, more scrupulous about these standards than the Morlands, might even have confiscated the letters. We modern readers smile upon the Morlands because of their mildness but the narrator also shows them to be rigorous about not acting like the parents of a golddigger might do; we are to understand they are morally good people in part because they await the general’s decision.
I asked my students a question: when is one no longer obligated to obey one’s parents? Answers varied: when you aren’t living under their roof, when you can vote, when you’re eighteen, when you’re sixteen, when you go to college—but of course the answer is never, if you are to obey the fifth commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” In Ephesians, St. Paul even says this is the first commandment to have a promise attached to it, emphasizing its importance. Whit Stillman’s Lady Susan in the 2016 film Love and Friendship manipulates her daughter by invoking this central teaching on family relationships in the Judeo-Christian tradition (and reveals her own Romish leanings by nominating this the fourth commandment, as it is in the Catholic Bible). The Morlands understand Henry is bound by this obedience even though he is a grown man and has independent means. As a Christian minister, he would be even more aware than the normal English layperson of its import, although he initially seems more disinclined than the Morlands to think of it at this juncture.
Fordyce in his famous sermons (which Austen knew well), provides an example of some of the most well-known advice of the era on this matter:
Of filial duty in all its branches she will naturally acquit herself best, who has the deepest sense of religion. “Keep thy father’s commandments, and forsake not the law of thy mother. Bind them continually upon thy heart, and tie them about thy neck. When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou wakest it shall talk with thee. Whoso revileth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness. The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.” Jesus was subject unto his parents. “Children obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honour thy father and mother (which is the first commandment with promise) that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” All this a Christian daughter has read with attention, and reflects upon with awe. It corresponds, in substance, with the instinct of nature, which it contributes at once to corroborate and exalt. She who truly reverences her parent in heaven, would tremble at the thought of dishonouring his representatives on earth. From their authority she has acquired the idea of his; and this last, including all that can be conceived of great and good, is the commanding idea of her life.
Austen never shows Catherine reading sermons, even in her youthful exposure to Elegant Extracts and other works. However, the two young people’s lack of resentment of the general’s tyrannical interference, which the narrator insists on, needs some explaining. Fordyce’s standards are not in any way out of the ordinary, but perfectly normal for the period. Austen is thinking of exactly this kind of expected obedience in the final pages of her novel; the hero and heroine’s last test is one of patience and obedience, and they pass it. Instead of eloping, Henry and Catherine wait. And Austen rewards them with the deus ex machina of Eleanor’s fortuitous marriage, which mollifies the general so, he gives Henry leave “to be a fool if he liked.” In fact, the disobedience of Henry consists only in the proposal, and the disobedience of Catherine, only in receiving and writing letters which she must know Henry’s father would disapprove. Austen clearly approves of both actions, in spite of their irregularity, so she seems to take a position resembling an Aristotelian mean. The “Great Forbidder,” General Tilney, is reduced comically to a convenient plot device for the author, and the disobedient children mildly await his paternal nod before their union, their love made stronger by his opposition and their forced separation. Rather than destroying the young people’s chance for happiness, General Tilney creates it and provides the opportunity for the comic ending of the novel.
Quotations are from the Cambridge edition of Northanger Abbey (2013), and from James Fordyce’s “On Good Works,” in Sermons to Young Women, Corrected and Greatly Enlarged (8th edition, 1796).
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“It was the air and attitude of a Montoni!” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Ninth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret C. Sullivan, Judith Thompson, and Sara Malton.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
February 9, 2018
Teenaged Gothic Daydreams: Coming of Age in Northanger Abbey
Gisèle M. Baxter’s teaching and research interests include the Gothic inheritance, especially in Victorian/neo-Victorian literature and popular culture, dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, and the contemporary bildungsroman. I’m delighted to introduce her guest post on gothic daydreams for my “Youth and Experience” blog series celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
Originally from Nova Scotia, Gisèle moved to Vancouver in 1997 to teach at the University of British Columbia. She’s co-editor, with Brett Grubisic and Tara Lee, of Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature (2014), and she’s currently preparing a Broadview Anthology of British Literature edition of Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla. In her spare time, she takes photographs, writes fiction, and takes beginner-level adult ballet classes.[image error]
…while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable. Oh! the dreadful black veil! My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina’s skeleton behind it. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 6)
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. (Northanger Abbey, Volume 2, Chapter 10)
Despite its status as a satire of the genre, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is popular among those of us who work in Gothic studies, and came up early in a senior undergraduate course in Victorian supernatural fiction I taught this past year. We were discussing susceptibility in terms of the Gothic reading the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw has done prior to her arrival at Bly, and of course Jane Eyre’s susceptibility came up, as did Catherine Morland’s.
You probably have, hidden at the back of the metaphorical cupboard of memory, some cultural pleasure of your adolescence you no longer admit to having loved. This is likely truer if you’re still quite young yourself; at some point later you may find yourself revisiting and enjoying it, realizing that your abandonment of it didn’t mean it was rubbish, it meant people whose opinions you valued disparaged it. Possibly nostalgia (even ironic) has caught up with it, and you can then freely broadcast your rediscovered youthful love, confident now that it is cool. In my case, it was Star Trek, the original TV series, which was running in syndication on Saturday mornings when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Star Trek was not cool then, and eventually I shredded my fan stories. Now, of course, I deeply regret that.
If you’ve read Anne of Green Gables, you’ll remember the episode when Marilla sends Anne on an evening errand to Diana’s house, only to discover that the girls, both very fond of ghost stories, have populated the path with characters from such tales and think of it now as the Haunted Wood, and Anne’s intensely sensitive imagination renders the place actually haunted. Marilla takes the tough love approach and insists Anne go anyway; Anne returns insisting, teeth chattering, that she’ll be content with the commonplace from this point. Well, we know she won’t, but after Miss Stacy’s arrival at the school, Anne desperately wants to finish reading a novel called The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall, on loan from Ruby Gillis. However, Miss Stacy says this is not a good book for girls their age (around 13) and so Anne abandons it (with a pang).
I must confess that when reading Anne for the first time, and younger than 13, I felt a little pang at this point, as I too wanted to know what the lurid mystery was. This brings me to 17-year-old Catherine Morland, protagonist (and heroine, after a fashion) of Jane Austen’s posthumously published early novel satirizing Gothic tropes, Northanger Abbey. Despite her lack of conventionally heroic qualities, Catherine loves to read from an early age, and has the opportunity to read quite broadly in her unprosperous but reasonably modern-minded middle-class environment. Her imagination is awakened by the quite lurid variety of 18th century Gothic fiction, all medievalism and sinister castles and predatory villains and virtuous heroines and secrets, and a fair amount of the explained supernatural Ann Radcliffe made a cornerstone of her improving approach to Gothic literature, and it is a nod to the novel’s attitude towards such material that much of it is recommended to Catherine by the duplicitous Isabella Thorne. Or is Northanger Abbey a slyer sort of satire than it is often given credit for being?
True, Catherine makes a fool of herself in trying to impose a Bluebeard narrative on the Abbey’s inhabitants, particularly General Tilney and his late wife. Yet in subtle ways, the novel also makes a case for the virtues of reading, even reading books in formative years that you might put to the back of the cupboard once you are a fully fledged adult.
First, and this is significant, Catherine’s reading becomes one of the first things she discovers in common with her eventual partner, Henry Tilney (though it’s perhaps even more significant that he’s a little older and more widely read).
Second, even if the novel mocks Catherine’s preferred adolescent reading and its effect on her, it also subtly suggests its benefits: she becomes more observant, less apt to give people the benefit of the doubt, so that as the initial pleasantness of association with the Thorpe siblings, James and Isabella, wears off, she discerns both his shallow dullness and her duplicity. And for that matter, even if he’s not hiding deep dark Gothic secrets, General Tilney is an arrogant autocrat with misplaced priorities as far as his children’s happiness is concerned, so that her aversion to him becomes at least partly justified, though not in the way she expected.
Finally, Catherine’s reading preferences reflect a rising trend that was to become even more notable in the 19th century: the production and consumption of what we’d now call “genre fiction” (much of it Gothic, and much of it ghost stories) by the rapidly increasing population of literate women with time to read and write. Indeed, there is an echo of Catherine’s breathless love of this material—if not of Catherine herself—in Little Women’s Jo March, herself an echo of Louisa May Alcott, who got her start writing Gothic fiction for popular magazines. And so, perhaps it’s best just to put those outgrown texts at the back of the cupboard, and not shred your fan stories, for you never know what enjoyment they might yield when revisited later, with an adult’s perspective.
Quotations are from the Penguin Classics edition of Northanger Abbey, edited and with an introduction by Marilyn Butler, revised 2003.
Eighth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Theresa Kenney, Judith Thompson, and Sara Malton.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
February 2, 2018
The Defense of Novels in Northanger Abbey
Leslie Nyman is the author of an historical novel, The Sound of Her Own Voice, which tells the story of a young woman traveling to the California gold rush. She blogs at soundofherownvoice.wordpress.com, and she lives in Western Massachusetts where, she tells me, she “re-reads Jane Austen regularly, writes fiction, and enjoys retirement.” Leslie is currently working on a fictional biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s travels to the Ottoman Empire in 1716. It’s a pleasure to introduce her guest post on Henry Tilney’s defense of novels in Northanger Abbey.
Yes, novels, for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performance to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?
I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in the threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another—we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers and while the abilities of the nine hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. (Volume 1, Chapter 5)
I have often wondered about, and completely enjoyed, Jane Austen’s impassioned defense of novels. Sarah’s invitation to participate in her delightful blog has given me the excuse to look more deeply into why Jane Austen wrote this paragraph and what cultural conversation she was joining. I have not been disappointed.
Gillian Dow notes in her essay “Reading at Godmersham: Edward’s Library and Marianne’s Books” (Persuasions 37 [2016]) that “The 18th century was an explosion of literacy in all classes, and ideas of appropriate reading material and the serious nature of reading, were discussed and debated in the private and crucially the public sphere.”
“By the last years of the 18th century the female novel reader had become the epitome of the misguided reading public. She was depicted as filled with delusive ideas, swayed by false ideas of love and romance, unable to concentrate on serious matters—all of which would lead to frivolity, impulsiveness, and possibly sexual indiscretion,” John Brewer says in The Pleasures of the Imagination [1997].
Conduct books came into their own at this time trying to provide a counter weight. Brewer quotes from a 1772 book called New and Elegant Amusements for the Ladies of Great Britain, by a Lady, in which young women were urged to “avoid the swarms of insipid novels, destitute of sentiment, language and morals.”
All this self-righteousness, and sexism, was ripe for Austen’s satire. But she was also a woman of her times and thus added a moral corrective. Catherine Morland, whom I never loved so much as in this latest reading of Northanger Abbey, is the answer to all the busybodies’ concerns. Here is a “heroine” who is often perceptive without understanding what she sees, and who knows right from wrong. One conversation with Henry Tilney easily brings her back to reality from a lurid fantasy. Despite her imagination in a dark room in an Abbey, or her vulnerable position in a coach alone during a long, disappointing ride home she does not resort to hysteria. Jane Austen has given us a practical, common-sense girl. Her moral center and reasonableness remain constant. Her flirtation with Gothic novels is ephemeral and does not threaten her despite Maria Edgeworth’s warning that “Books of mere entertainment … should be sparingly used, especially in the education of girls,” as quoted by Laura Cappello Bromling in “The Novel Reader’s Blues” (Jane Austen Sings the Blues [2009]). Catherine Morland puts the lie to Hannah More’s admonishments that novels “take off wholesome restraints, diminish sober mindedness, impair the general powers of resistance, and at best feed habits of improper indulgence…” (quoted by Bromling).
Jane Austen’s defense continues: “’I am no novel reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common cant.”
Sadly, three hundred years of attitude and judgements are not easily shaken off. I hate to, but must, admit that when I was a younger woman I often found myself apologizing for reading novels. I wanted to be taken seriously. As Elaine Bander writes in her article “‘O Leave Novels’: Jane Austen, Sir Charles Grandison, Sir Edward Denham and Rob Mossgiel” (Persuasions 30 [2008]), “both Burney and Edgeworth, the two authors whose novels [Austen] praises here, had labeled their own novels ‘works,’ rather than expose them to critical disdain by classifying them as ‘novels’” (my emphasis). Happily, with age and maturity I have been cured. I openly join my favorite author in claiming that in novels “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”
Quotations from Northanger Abbey are taken from the 1880 edition published in London by Richard Bentley.
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“The luxury of a … frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Seventh in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Gisèle Baxter, Theresa Kenney, and Judith Thompson.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
January 26, 2018
Revisiting Northanger Abbey
“There was no reason to think she would grow up to be anything out of the ordinary,” says Lisa Pliscou on the first page of her new picture book biography of Jane Austen. Brave Jane Austen: Reader, Writer, Author, Rebel will be published next week by Henry Holt/Macmillan, and you can read more about it (and see a few sample pages) on Lisa’s website.[image error]
I really enjoyed Lisa’s book Young Jane Austen: Becoming a Writer, which I wrote about when it was published in 2015 (“Imagining Jane Austen’s Childhood”), and I’m excited about her new book.[image error]
Lisa writes for children and adults, and her other books include a novel, Higher Education, which David Foster Wallace praised as “an authorial coup.”
Congratulations on Brave Jane Austen, Lisa! And thank you for writing today’s guest post for my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”
Seeing “The Graduate” again decades after an initial viewing is, appropriately enough, like attending a college reunion. Films are in a sense like old friends, and revisiting them years later inevitably raises the question of whether what you once enjoyed still brings you pleasure.
– Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2017
I have a wonderful time on my first visit to Northanger Abbey.
All is light and bright and sparkling.
I take great pleasure in Austen’s skill at creating characters who—with their virtues and flaws, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies—come alive in their authenticity. They reach across the span of time and place: these are fully recognizable people.
Too, I enjoy how Austen pokes fun at the literary excess of her era’s Gothic novels. Her voice is deft, witty, engendering an almost conspiratorial quality which invites the reader to share in her solipsistic worldview.
In this atmosphere of camaraderie, then, how easy to feel sympathetic interest in the artless Catherine Morland. How easy to fall under the spell of Henry Tilney’s wit and charm. To sail lightly on the story’s surface, drawn along by its author’s dazzling self-assurance.
I surrender to Northanger Abbey just like Catherine giving her heart to Henry: speedily, entirely. Naively. The ending satisfies. General Tilney is routed by his son Henry’s defiance, there is reconciliation, there is a wedding.
Everybody smiles.
*
I visit Northanger Abbey again.
The story is the same, but it’s I who am different.
The writing I still love, but the ending now troubles me. It seems thin, rushed.
I remember watching The Graduate a second time, after a long interval, and being struck by that indelible moment when Ben and Elaine are sitting together at the back of the bus and their triumphant exuberance begins to fade. All at once I—a more thoughtful, more sophisticated viewer than when I first saw it—realize that I’m watching not just a biting comedy but also, possibly, a tragedy.
I recall Joan Aiken’s razor-sharp portrayal of Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in her odd, bleak novel Eliza’s Daughter: theirs was a marriage made in the face of devastating family disapproval, and she shows them, years later, ground down by endless drudgery and genteel poverty.
I picture Catherine and Henry at their wedding.
They stand before the minister. The happy couple. Henry victorious, Catherine amazed by her good fortune.
The bells ring.
My mind ranges back, into the narrative, thinking about these two characters. These two people.
*
Henry Tilney’s ardor, the narrator bluntly—slyly—remarks, is the direct result of hers for him:
I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.
It is, perhaps, a precarious foundation for a union which must endure till death arrives to sever it.
How long will Henry sustain these feelings for a girl who, though she is sweet-natured and affectionate, doesn’t equal him in intellect or sense of humor? Will he come in time to treat her with the same scornful disdain Mr. Bennet displays toward his wife?
As for Catherine: how long will she continue to uncritically adore a man who is fond of correcting and informing? A young woman of eighteen may be a very different person at twenty-eight or thirty-eight; in maturity will she resent the role of acolyte? If, that is, she survives the many years of pregnancy and childbearing which—“poor animal,” as Austen once described such a woman—is likely to be her lot.
I wonder.
And now my mind stretches ahead, uneasily.
*
I return again to Northanger Abbey.
I know, now, a great deal more about the life and times and writings of Jane Austen. I know that she wrote it as part of a remarkable creative burst after the abrupt departure of Tom Lefroy—a young man she liked, though the depth of her affection remains a mystery—in the summer of 1796, when she was twenty-one.
Austen began with First Impressions, a romance, in the fall and finished it the next summer. (The title would eventually become Pride and Prejudice.) A few months later she returned to an earlier work, Elinor and Marianne—a debate of sorts, as Claire Tomalin says in Jane Austen: A Life—and renamed it Sense and Sensibility. The following year, extending her artistic range yet further, she wrote a first draft of Susan, a satirical project, which she would revise a few years later, in 1802, in the aftermath of Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal and her rejection of it. This manuscript she now called Northanger Abbey.
I read.
The story is the same, but it’s I who, again, have changed.
*
I go deeper. Penetrating the sparkling surface and diving down. Here there is light and darkness mingled.
I hold in my mind, this time, the genius of its young author and her incandescent creative growth. I hold in my mind, now, the multiple layers of Northanger Abbey. Austen’s witty meta-level defense of the novel, during a time in which it was often seen as a suspect, inferior, even morally dangerous genre. Her brilliance in locating the true psychological horror not in an old Radcliffian chest but in the very nature of General Tilney. Her sly, defiant subversion of tropes and expectations. She gives over to us a love story as a sweet fillip, legerdemain, which doubles in on itself: reader, here it is, the comic romance plot, the conventional engine, but you won’t be distracted, will you? Because there’s a lot more going on here. Do you see it? Here, in the present moment, look closely, and stay with me, a writer in the bloom of health, youth, infinite promise. Here is my wit, my persuasion, my shrewd divining of human nature, my joke, my riddle, my laughter.
*
Northanger Abbey isn’t perfect—no book is—and it has weaknesses. Limitations. But it’s also a work which, in its beguiling complexity, effortlessly sustains multiple readings. New interpretations. Fresh insight.
I will return again.
I wonder what I’ll find?
Sixth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Leslie Nyman, Gisèle Baxter, and Theresa Kenney.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
January 19, 2018
“Miss Morland; do but look at my horse”: Horses’ John Thorpe Problem
Kate Scarth is the Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her research focuses on English and Canadian literature written from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and she’s particularly interested in fiction about urbanism and the environment. Her book Romantic Suburbs: Fashion, Sensibility, and Greater London (under contract with the University of Toronto Press) has a chapter on Jane Austen’s Emma and suburban space. She is also leading a digital humanities, public engagement project, which includes a mobile app and website supporting a literary walking tour of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Kate wrote a guest post for my “Emma in the Snow” series a couple of years ago, on “Highbury Heights; or, George and Emma Knightley, Suburban Developers,” and I’m very happy to welcome her back with this post on the horses in Northanger Abbey.
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Photo by Mike Needham
John Thorpe is the co-villain of Northanger Abbey. He is the man whose avarice, then spite, leads to the lies that cause General Tilney to commit his own villainous act: throwing Catherine out and getting her as near to being the hard-done-by Gothic heroine as she ever gets. Thorpe, like Emma’s Mrs Elton, talks endlessly about carriages (his gig and horses replace her sister’s barouche landau). Their obsession with commercial goods negates actual conversation and relationships. For Thorpe, women are to be talked at about gigs and horses, while men are only potential buyers of horses and dogs. Thorpe is also a Mrs. Elton-style foil whose bad qualities actually highlight the other characters’ own shortcomings, namely their own conspicuous consumption: Isabella’s focus on a rich husband with a ritzy Richmond villa, Mrs. Allen’s dress fixation, and even the heroine’s immersion in Gothic novels. Case in point: on the way to Blaise Castle, “Thorpe talked to his horse” and Catherine “meditated” on Gothic architecture (“broken arches,” “false hangings,” and “trap-doors” [Chapter 11]).
Thorpe’s gig couldn’t go anywhere without his horses, of course (not even part of the way to Blaise Castle), and so we’re going to follow his advice and “look at [his] horse.” Horses in Austen’s novels and in the Regency period more generally are, of course, ubiquitous, but often unacknowledged. Horses do the heavy lifting whenever a person is travelling and whenever a letter is sent (in this novel, horses connect Fullerton, Bath, Northanger, Woodston, and London). Here I’ll briefly shift focus to horses with a gesture that others, like Jo Baker in Longbourn, have made with servants, other vital but liminal presences in Austen’s work.
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“The boldness of his riding.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Mollands.net).
Exceptionally in Northanger Abbey, horses are brought to the fore via Thorpe’s conversation and actions. This spotlight is undesirable, given the violence and crass commercialism with which he treats them. And yet, an animal rights narrative in Northanger Abbey emerges with Thorpe’s treatment of animals and its divergence from other characters’ and especially the successful hero-suitors’ relationships with horses.
One way that Austen champions animals is by linking the treatment of women and animals (thereby anticipating twentieth-century feminists and animal rights activists). For example, Thorpe’s gig is a Gothicized space for both Catherine and his horse. For both, the gig is a space of captivity described with Gothicized language of danger, death, and violence. Catherine’s first view of the gig is of “a most knowing-looking coachman with all the vehemence that could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his horse” and “the horse was immediately checked with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches” (Chapter 7, my emphasis). Later when Thorpe is driving Catherine, violence is again emphasized, as he warns, “You will not be frightened, Miss Morland…if my horse should dance about a little at first setting off. He will, most likely, give a plunge or two” (Chapter 9). Catherine “was too young to own herself frightened,” but everything goes smoothly: the never humble Thorpe assures “her that it was entirely owing to the peculiarly judicious manner in which he had then held the reins, and the singular discernment and dexterity with which he had directed his whip” (Chapter 9). Thorpe’s gig then is a Gothicized space for the horses, one in which they are forcibly and violently contained—with harnesses, reins, and whips—for most of their lives.
As well as Austen’s violent language here, carriages are also staples of the Gothic and sentimental genres, as vehicles used to kidnap heroines (Austen jokingly alludes to the typical advice a heroine would receive before heading out into the world: “[c]autions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse” [Chapter 2]). Thorpe enacts a domesticated, everyday version of the Gothic villain. He gets Catherine in his gig by lying to her, then keeps her in it through physical force (refusing to stop the gig when she asks). He also makes her a conversational captive, forcing her to listen to his insistent bragging about said gig and horse, while not considering that she might have her own conversation or ideas. This scene highlights unequal, and highly gendered, access to mobility and voice.
Thorpe’s mistreatment of horses adds a sinister layer to his behaviour towards our heroine. Indeed, his reckless driving could physically endanger her and merely riding with a man in an open carriage could damage her reputation (as Catherine’s guardians, the Allens, belatedly decide). Indeed, Thorpe does have the power to damage Catherine’s reputation (at least with General Tilney), destroy her happiness (temporarily stalling her happy ending with Henry), and open her up to physical and sexual violence (when his lies lead General Tilney to fling her out into the world).
Thorpe’s deficiencies reveal Northanger Abbey’s connection between equine care and proper masculinity. His horse obsession extends to his clothes, which resemble a groomsman’s or coachman’s, a not so subtle dig at his dubious claims to the title of gentleman. And Northanger Abbey relays a message that, unlike Thorpe, hero-gentlemen treat animals, well, gently. For example, while Austen tells us little about Eleanor Tilney’s husband, we do know that his servant left a farrier’s bill (Catherine’s imagined mysterious manuscript), reading “To poultice chestnut mare” (Chapter 22). While we see Thorpe abusing horses, in this brief glimpse of Eleanor’s future husband, Austen chooses to cast him as a man paying to ease a horse’s ailment.
Then, of course, there is Henry Tilney, the novel’s hero. On the journey to Northanger, his driving is explicitly contrasted with Thorpe’s: “so nimbly were the light horses disposed to move …. But the merit of the curricle did not all belong to the horses; Henry drove so well—so quietly—without making any disturbance, without parading to her [Catherine], or swearing at them [the horses]: so different from the only gentleman-coachman whom it was in her power to compare him with!” (Chapter 20). Catherine, of course, is in love, but the treatment of horses (no whips, no swearing, no disturbances) here marks the make of the man. Reinforcing Henry’s relationship with animals are the companionable dogs that are an ubiquitous highlight of the visit to his Woodston home.
Northanger Abbey shows that the conduct towards subordinates, i.e., horses, indicates how one will treat others in one’s power, including wives in the Regency period. But what if instead of thinking about how men’s conduct towards animals illuminates their treatment of women, we look at it the other way around and instead zero in on the horse’s plight? Thorpe’s horse actually has it much worse than Catherine, who unlike him and indeed unlike the typical Gothic heroine, never faces actual physical danger. While when Thorpe drives, people, himself included, are at risk, only the horses receive physical blows and so come closest to injury (Thorpe takes horses plunging to the ground as a matter of course). Catherine’s interactions with this boorish brute last only a few awkward afternoons and dances, but the horse has no such escape, does not get to retreat to idyllic Woodston. Austen presents an exemplary model of the treatment of animals in Henry Tilney, while clearly presenting animal rights as an unresolved, ongoing issue as long as the Thorpes of the world live to drive another day.
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“Pray, pray stop, Mr. Thorpe.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Mollands.net).
Fifth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Lisa Pliscou, Leslie Nyman, and Gisèle Baxter.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
January 12, 2018
The Eyes of Society
Today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey is by Serena Burdick, author of Girl in the Afternoon: A Novel of Paris. Serena graduated from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in California before moving to New York City to pursue a degree in English Literature at Brooklyn College. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two sons, and she says her “passion for theater, writing, the visual arts, Edouard Manet and the Impressionist movement” inspired her to write Girl in the Afternoon, her debut novel. Heather Webb calls the novel “a provocative tale of family secrets, betrayal, and the renewal of self-discovery.”
If you’d like to know more about Serena’s work, you can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and/or visit her website, where she tells the story of a childhood in which she “lived in books of the past,” and wanted, “more than anything else, to actually be Anne of Green Gables and Laura Ingalls.” I’m delighted to introduce her contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”
Oh, the problem of the dress! She shakes her head in dismay. Silk is only appropriate for certain occasions. Muslin is lovely, but it frays terribly when washed. And then, of course, if it is to be muslin, which one should she choose: spotted or sprigged? The mull, the jackonet, or the tamboured?
“What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern” (Northanger Abbey, Chapter 10).
At first glance, Jane Austen’s heroine in Northanger Abbey, Catherine, appears to be the quintessential teenager. Clinging to her girlfriend’s arm, glancing coquettishly over her fan, musing wistfully over anything said in her direction. And yet Austen—even though she understands the pressure a young lady faces to behave appropriately, dress perfectly, present herself with ease and grace, and flirt to perfection—is clearly poking fun at the emotional drama arising in an overly active imagination of a young girl working hard to be the perfect heroine.
How one dressed was always the first impression: who was wearing what, which girl had on something new, or significantly impressive. And then there was the challenge of wearing a dress, and of making it through an evening without the embarrassing mishap of a tear, a spill, or a stain. “Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having preserved her gown from injury” (Chapter 2).
Of course weather was a chief concern regarding attire. If it rained on the day of an afternoon walk, the walk was delayed until the ground was dry enough not to muddy the bottom of a skirt. The day Catherine expects Mr. and Miss Tilney to accompany her in an afternoon stroll, she watches the rain through the windows with much anxiety. They will not come for her in such weather, and even if it clears up it is unlikely they will come out so soon after, for fear of the mud.
These are the trivial incidents that can send Catherine into a whirlwind of emotions. She is either the happiest creature in the world, or the most wretched. Her wild and lurid imagination throws her into tears over the merest suspicion of impropriety, or into fits of delight over faint possibilities.
At the root of these seemingly minuscule anxieties, especially ones concerning appearance, is the fear of being judged by others. “Confused by his notice, and blushing from the fear of its being excited by something wrong in her appearance, she turned away her head” (Chapter 10). Catherine is constantly watching out for what someone else might find wrong with her; how she might not be being good enough, or where she will make a mistake. Nineteenth century society dictated that people rarely said what they really felt, even in matters of triviality. This often led to a tangle of confusion in matters of love and engagement. The confusion, in turn, gave way to the constant torment of not being able to express oneself properly, or truthfully. “So fearful was she of not doing exactly what was right, and of not being able to preserve their good opinion” (Chapter 20).
Subtle behaviors became even more important. When a lady felt something, she was expected to keep it to herself until the gentleman showed his affection first. “Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal” (Chapter 10). Catherine’s greatest agony is over her affection for Mr. Tilney, but she doesn’t dare express it. The only thing she can do is put herself in his path hoping to gain his attention, which circles back to the excruciating importance of her attire, appearance, and charm—her basic tool kit as a woman. Her flawless conduct is her only chance of not offending the man she loves, and thereby losing the attention she so desires.
Catherine is highly aware of the hasty opinions and false conclusions she has made about others. When she rides away in the carriage with the Thorpes, she passes the Tilneys without stopping—oh, what will they ever think of her? How is she to explain it was not her fault, that Mr. Thorpe would not stop the carriage? When the Allens tell her they do not think it proper for a young lady to ride around in open carriages with men they are not related to, she is mortified that she has done something improper without even knowing it.
Even though it appears that Catherine has nothing better to do with her time than throw herself full force into the drama of her own story of petty perfectionism—and the flawless dress—these seemingly trivial concerns were a matter of survival: a woman’s only hope in life was on the arm of a respectable man. Without money from either the family you came from, or the family you married into, you were stranded. It is with humor that Austen illustrates this reality in Catherine’s life, a reality that was not unique to our heroine, but something all nineteenth century young women faced.
To be the perfect heroine is to be the perfect woman. To be the perfect woman is to find the perfect husband. At every moment a woman’s reputation is at stake. The eyes of society peer from every corner of every room. To slip up, to say the wrong thing or wear the wrong dress, is to no longer be respectable or desirable, which our exemplary Catherine knows only too well.
Quotations are from the Norton edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by Susan Fraiman (2004).
Fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Kate Scarth, Lisa Pliscou, and Leslie Nyman.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook , Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).
January 5, 2018
Northanger Abbey’s Scare Quotes
Happy New Year! It’s a pleasure to introduce Lynn Festa’s contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”
(If you missed the first two posts in the series, you can catch up here: the first one was by Deborah Barnum, on the publishing history of Northanger Abbey, and the second was by Peter Sabor, on Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author.”)
Lynn was JASNA’s North American Scholar at the 2014 AGM in Montreal, and she gave a fascinating lecture on “The Noise in Mansfield Park.” She suggested that the novel is “Austen’s noisiest book, filled with clamor and disharmony” (Persuasions 36 [2014]). I love what she said about the way Austen invites us to listen carefully, to remember that “the right to hear and to be heard is not impartially distributed.”
Lynn is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, and the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, as well as of articles on the slave trade, the history of human rights, wigs, dogs, the eighteenth-century novel, and Jane Austen. Today’s guest post on Northanger Abbey addresses the question of what it means to learn by memorizing quotations.
Early in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s narrator tells us of Catherine Morland’s youthful reading preferences:
[P]rovided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she never had any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories, with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives. (Volume 1, Chapter 1)
If Catherine’s preferences in leisure reading—“all story and no reflection”—indicate the appetite for plot that drives the Gothic reader, her subsequent embrace of higher-minded texts is prompted not by a revolution in taste but by the mandatory curriculum for a wannabe heroine. The embattled Gothic protagonist, after all, must be able to deliver her lines on cue—and where do these conveniently apropos quotes come from, after all? Exposing the labor behind the Gothic heroine’s cultural literacy, the narrator offers a sampler of the great wisdom Catherine has harvested from the works of great authors and set aside for future use:
From Pope, she learnt to censure those who
“bear about the mockery of woe.”
From Gray, that
“Many a flower is born to blush unseen,
“And waste its fragrance on the desert air.”
From Thompson, that—
“It is a delightful task
“To teach the young idea how to shoot.”
And from Shakespeare she gained a great store of information—amongst the rest, that—
“Trifles light as air,
“Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,
“As proofs of Holy Writ.”
That
“The poor beetle, which we tread upon,
“In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
“As when a giant dies.”
And that a young woman in love always looks—
“like Patience on a monument
“Smiling at Grief.” (Volume 1, Chapter 1)
Misquoted, condensed, and veering precariously close to clichés, Catherine’s catalogue of portable bromides converts the national poetic canon into an inexhaustible trove of trite sayings—so many platitudes plucked from their original contexts and stored up in wait for an occasion to which they may be triumphantly applied. In exposing the ease with which the artifacts of high culture—the male poets Pope, Gray, Shakespeare, Thomson—may be reduced to quotable quotes, Austen savages a literary hierarchy that unquestioningly values the writings of men—or even anthologies recycling their words—over the novel.
Quotations reproduce received wisdom with an impersonality that pretends to universality. They offer a fast-track to wisdom or a shortcut to the appearance of it. But quoting may not display our refined taste or education. Instead, it may become the quasi-automatic disgorging of partially digested required reading, revealing us to be the vacuous parrots of wisdom that is not our own. (I’m thinking of you, Mary Bennet.) Yet what should we make of Austen’s mockery of literary quotation in a novel that parodies the conventions—and clichés—of a genre? Northanger Abbey, after all, is a book that repeatedly quotes the Gothic genre it affectionately parodies, mercilessly using the genre’s figures and conceits against it.
Northanger Abbey is, I think, fascinated by the question of quotation—in part because Austen recognizes that we are all quoting others, all the time. Cultural literacy involves the recognition (and quotation) of the already known. Henry Tilney’s much-vaunted cleverness is ultimately as derivative and formulaic as Catherine’s beloved Gothic; his disquisition on the picturesque is a jumble of jargon—“fore-grounds, distances and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades.” Henry traffics in more sophisticated clichés, but they are clichés nonetheless, an elaborated set of conventions, no better and no worse than those governing the Gothic mode. All education involves quotation: the adaptation of others’ language and ideas for ourselves. Yet, when (and how) do the words we quote become our own? Seen from one angle, Catherine’s education in Northanger Abbey involves learning to quote something—someone—different, replacing one set of clichés with another. Yet Catherine must also learn the difference between naïve and skeptical quotation—the difference between simple iteration of someone else’s words or ideas and repetition with a critical eye.
Although Catherine is invited to reject the Gothic in favor of more refined pleasures, Austen recognizes that the Gothic also involves a form of cultural literacy—conventions that make visible distinctive aspects of the world. Catherine’s quotation of the Gothic—her application of its clichés to the world she encounters—offers language for states of being that seem otherwise inexpressible and creates communities (mainly of women) who recognize the same allusions. For if quotations at times short-circuit the intellectual and emotional labor required to know how one feels or what one thinks, at others they lend words that enable us to give voice to otherwise inexpressible sentiments or feelings. Indeed, one might say that quotations serve as vessels—even crypts—that contain meanings or histories that may supersede the understanding or intentions of those who wield them. Gothic, indeed!
When we quote, we speak someone else’s words, and words repeated often enough start to erase the quotation marks, making the words our own. In written texts, we use quotation marks to designate the transition from one person’s speech to another separate people and to distinguish levels of discourse in the novel by separating the narrator’s voice from that of a character. Yet we should recall that Austen’s most famous contribution to the novel is Free Indirect Discourse, which erases the division between the narrator’s and character’s speech, excising the quotation marks that separate off one voice from another. Not least of the Gothic hauntings in Northanger Abbey issues from the narrator’s dissolution of the quote marks that separate the character’s mind from the narrator’s knowledge and commentary, a doubling of voices that suggests the permeability of the barriers between our mental worlds.
While Free Indirect Discourse removes the quotation mark and thus erases the division between a character’s thoughts or words and those of her narrator, Austen in Northanger Abbey is also fascinated by the assertive marking of the fact of quotation—by what we now call scare quotes. We might say that the quotable quotes from Pope, Gray, and Cowper, with which we began—like her quotes from the Gothic—are surrounded less by quotation marks than by scare quotes. Quotation marks designate words as belonging to one person, one text, as opposed to another; scare quotes (whether as a typographical “feint” or an air-quoting gesture) convey knowingness or skepticism: a common ironic distance from the naïve affirmation that something exists. Yet scare quotes are also a sign of dependency. We retain an expression and put quote marks around it because the term or concept seems in some way indispensible: we may not quite know what to do with a term around which we put scare quotes, but we can’t quite do without it. If, for example, we put scare quotes around a term like the “Gothic,” we change it from the actual world to which language refers, to something already marked off as, if not necessarily fiction, then not simply and self-evidently there.
The point I am trying to make is that Austen’s quotations from the Gothic in Northanger Abbey are surrounded not so much by quotation marks as by scare quotes. In nesting quotations from Shakespeare, from Pope, from Gray, and Cowper in a text in which she repeatedly quotes from mass-market Gothic romances, Austen wants us to see through the Gothic and its conventions, but she also wants us to see that quotations shape—and are shaped by—the world in much the same way as these lofty lines culled from great works of literature by men. Indeed, the Gothic perhaps has more than these great canonical poets to tell us about the work done by quotation and cliché in fashioning our everyday lives—for if the Gothic frequently lapses into cliché, it also has a meta-critical relation to it. In offering a parade of quotable quotes, Austen puts scare quotes around quotations, holding them up for mockery, to be sure, but also enabling us to reflect on the ways our worlds, whether we are readers of Shakespeare and Austen, or Radcliffe and Lewis, are pasted together from language that is never just, never fully, our own.
Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Northanger Abbey, edited by James Kingsley and John Davie, with an introduction by Claudia Johnson (2008).
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“The luxury of a … frightened imagination over the pages of Udolpho.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)
Third in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Serena Burdick, Kate Scarth, and Lisa Pliscou.
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