Romantic Reading in/at Northanger Abbey
While Henry Tilney instructs the heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, to read the world–and histories–and to erect boundaries as real as the walls of an (imagined) Gothic structure, between the reading of reality and the reading of novels and thus of novelty–Jane Austen instructs us on romantic reading practices in the fashion of that historical period in which she writes: practices to be applied to reading romance in the “real” world (or at least the reality depicted by Austen). How to read false friends like Isabella, rakes like Captain Tilney, and fakes like General Tilney becomes imperative for Catherine’s very survival. While Catherine’s Gothic reading habits superfluously project whimsical fantasy onto her “reality” in Northanger Abbey and at Northanger Abbey, her instincts regarding General Tilney’s character are only ridiculous because of their Gothic novel- esque exaggeration. His threat to her physical safety is real. Thus, her intuition is not to be discounted. While the general had not–in “fact”–murdered his wife as Henry teaches us in his mother’s room (while he insists these things cannot happen in England or at the hands of Christians–points to refute/examine another time), he does propel Catherine into a situation in which it would be perfectly reasonable for her to fear for her life. This is the criticality with which, even in this romance/satire, reading is essential not only for entertainment, seduction/courting and preservation of history–but for survival.
Like pre-Northanger Catherine, some readers of Austen very well could be blank canvases on which Henry/Austen could paint; while readers blessed with more common sense than Catherine would be “in” on the jokes and in a Hobbesian sense, laughing with/at Catherine perched “above” her ignorance of the subtle yet complicated ways in which love expresses itself in the romantic, post-Richardson, post-Burney English reading society in which a “master” imprisoning/marrying his servant and in which Evelina married Lord Orville. For, as Northanger‘s “biographer” puts it: “Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”
A balance between romance and history, or romance and reality (well, reality as depicted in this novel), is necessary. And a pair of brothers and sisters–Isabella and John, Henry and Elinor–are just the ones to teach Catherine–and us–this lesson. Specifically, brother-and-sister pairs, one without a father, one without the guidance of a mother, in contrast to Catherine and James’s married parents and adoptive parents, the Allens. (Examining the role played by fathers and mothers and the absence thereof during the “Long Eighteenth Century” could make for an interesting paper in and of itself.)
Henry’s playfulness with words begets a joyful bantering in the English language possible for someone who is “well read” as he and Elinor–and Austen–are, in both novels and histories, and in the ways of characters like their militaristic father and brother (men of the world, who travel to collect lands and goods on behalf of the British Empire, disrespecting young females such as Catherine and Isabella alike). When Catherine, representative of the Gothic novel, reading-for-enjoyment camp, describes writers of histories as
“to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it,”
Henry replies:
“they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.”
Henry here illuminates a new way to read that connects the history with the novel, torment with pleasure: humor, in the form of satire or comedy, of both genres. Gone should be the days, Austen argues and ushers in in this novel, of competition between the two–serious and non-serious–types of reading–epitomized in the witty narrator’s famous rant on heroines of novels’ being forced/expected to disdain novels.
The satirical realm of Northanger Abbey beckons us to experience the joy and torment of a Radcliffean romance, while not delving so deep that General Tilney must pull us from the depths of the dark Gothic period back into romantic reality, where social climbing brothers and sisters like the Thorpes prey upon innocent country folk like the Morlands.
When we the readers approach Northanger with Catherine and Henry as spectators in their scandalous (according to the Allens–sometimes) open carriage, Henry invents a Gothic story for Catherine, and our, entertainment, that borders on seductive. He knows this tale will give her extreme pleasure and send her emotions into “ecstacies” like those that Evelina describes on watching Garrick act:
“How fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment! — And what will you discern? — Not tables, toilettes, wardrobes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps the remains of a broken lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts can open, and over the fireplace the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose features will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to withdraw your eyes from it…you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you — and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten your door, you discover, with increased alarm, that it has no lock.”
Little does Henry know, this exact scene seduces Catherine to perform this very scene–because Catherine is that impressionable. In Northanger Abbey and at Northanger Abbey, Catherine grows. She learns to have agency and think for herself, like a “good” reader during the romantic period. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge puts it, in Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists:
Readers may be divided into four classes. I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
During Catherine’s journey from the country (innocence), to Bath (romance), to Northanger (tragedy) and back to the country (comedy/acceptance), she moves from the “sponge” class of reader, absorbing all she reads; in Bath, she retains nothing and is content with “getting through the time” there until she can be with Henry; to a “mogul diamond” who has profited (survived) by what she read in the real and fictional realms within this fiction, thus “enabling others”–us–“to profit by it also.”
