Jane Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

In a memorable scene in Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to "the statue of surprize" spoken of by poets.¹ Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named "Surprize."² If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenth-century novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader's expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe's narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor's Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe's title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator's experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon's formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century news-ballads and early novels, "strange, therefore true" (5–6).

What the adjective "surprising" adds to "strange" is affect—the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the foreign, or the inexplicable. It also encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange; the mundane, too, can be arresting. In its participial ambiguity, the word aptly suggests the intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenth- century novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought; both will be seized by an experience of the new. As an adventure-narrative, Crusoe promises an aesthetic form of surprise (delight in the new); and as a spiritual autobiography of self-correction, it delivers a salubrious moral surprise (the experience of being jolted from inattention into awareness).

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, famous as a novel about novel-reading, crystallizes many salient features of the eighteenth-century discourse of surprise. Its young heroine Catherine Morland, who temporarily leaves the provincial routine of Fullerton for the social intrigues of Bath, is perpetually startled by the books she reads and the people she meets, even as Austen's narrator archly registers the presumably jaded reader's familiarity with novelistic conventions and the ways of the world. The emotion of surprise is important to all of Austen's novels, but it appears with particular intensity and frequency in this one. Even more than in Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion, the heroine's courtship is mediated by eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. Discussing the plots and merits of novels, acquiring the language of the picturesque, parsing the lexical nuances of words for the sublime ("shocking") and the beautiful ("nice"), learning to love a rose—all are alibis (and stimuli) for the growing erotic interest between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney. These things are, like Henry himself, novelties to Catherine, and it is partly for this reason that surprise figures so prominently in the narrative.

In reading Northanger Abbey through this lens, I wish to challenge critical accounts that either dismiss surprise as a symptom of the young heroine's naïveté or overlook it in favor of its stronger relative, alarm; and thus to identify in the novel a powerful eighteenth-century idea and narrative device. Stuart Tave, the first critic to comment on the prevalence of the word in the novel, offers this gloss: "Surprise is a foolish thing, as it offers itself in, for example, the indeterminateness of what is 'odd' as it creates the emotion of an undefined 'alarm,' it is dissolved; in its stead is a process of understanding by means of 'observation' of what is and a determination of 'probability'" (37).³ In what is essentially a novel of education, Catherine Morland must abandon her gothic suspicion that her host at the abbey, General...