General Tilney and Tyranny: Northanger Abbey

General Tilney and Tyranny: Northanger AbbeyShinobu Minma Northanger Abbey falls short of Catherine Morland's expectations from the first. At the entrance to its grounds, the lodges present "a modern appearance" (p. 161); the furniture of the drawing room is "in all the profusion and elegance of modern taste"(p. 162).1 Indeed, Northanger Abbey turns out to be far from what Catherine's eager imagination has pictured to herself, and the contrast between her expectation of "a fine old place" (p. 157) and the glaring newness which everywhere meets her eye heightens the comical effect of the Abbey scenes in the novel. This contrast, however, serves not merely to expose the naivety of a girl addicted to novels; it also highlights the peculiar inclinations of General Tilney, the owner of Northanger, who has transformed an ancient abbey into a place for exhibiting modern products and inventions . The General's love of improvement and novelty is indeed almost as obsessive as Catherine's yearning for ruins and antiquities. Catherine's naivety is also revealed through her fantastic adventures; fancifully identifying the General with such fictional villains as Montoni, she looks for evidence of imaginary guilt. This confusion of fiction and reality, while testifying to her simplicity, is an illuminating comment on the character of the General as an avaricious despot. General Tilney deserves our close attention in his own right; he by no means functions merely as a subject of Catherine's study. If he is a man of mystery—a puzzle to solve—to Catherine, so he is to the modern reader. The General has a passion for improvement and novelty, and Jane Austen underlines his 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, vol. 5 in The Novels ofJane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 161, 162. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 4, July 1996 504 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION enthusiasm by describing his possessions and activities with a minuteness unusual for her. But what is her purpose in doing so? Is it only to laugh at the vanity of a wealthy, worldly-minded landowner? Along with these questions, we must consider carefully why the General is connected with Gothic villains. Catherine's Gothic adventures are out of tune with the rest of the book, and there must have been some important reason that the author would risk such dissonance. Jane Austen certainly implies more about the General than she makes explicit; to grasp her meaning it is necessary to find links between the images associated with the General and contemporary political and social conditions. His character as a domestic autocrat is a key to the complicated message the author tries to convey. Jane Austen twice uses the word "tyranny." In the opening paragraph we are told that Catherine "was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome , and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny" (p. 14). And in the closing passage, which parodies the moralizing cliché of contemporary novels, we find the phrase "parental tyranny" (p. 252). "Parental tyranny" refers, of course, to General Tilney. He is a despot, "accustomed on every ordinary occasion to give the law in his family " (p. 247). His binding authority is such that he is "always a check upon his children's spirits" (p. 156). As a character he is rather simplified ; described from outside and with exaggeration, General Tilney may be called a caricature or a "flat" character. Yet Jane Austen's representation of his despotism is subtle. Alistair Duckworth observes that his domestic tyranny is revealed in his exacting demand of punctuality from his family; he betrays an extraordinary degree of impatience and irritation with any delay, and certainly "his obsessive attitude toward time," as Duckworth puts it, bespeaks his inexorable martinettish disposition.2 But more than this, all the essential characteristics of tyranny are quite skilfully embodied in General Tilney; and when we combine his tyrannical personality with the images associated with him, this caricatured figure begins to assume a grave and even sinister character.«An ?gs In the "Advertisement" to Northanger Abbey, written in 1816 in preparation for its publication, Jane Austen requests the reader to...