The Lessons of Northanger Abbey

ERIC ROTHSTEIN The Lessons of Northanger Abbey In Northanger Abbey, as in a number of works of eighteenth-century fiction (say, Tom Jones), the protagonist and the reader undergo parallel, but in almost no way identical, educations. The reader, as Austen's irony announces in the first paragraph, is to be led toward something better than the conventional novels to which she alludes again and again in the course of the book. As to the protagonist, the first chapter offers a dry account of Catherine's progress in music and drawing; these early lessons are extended by Mrs Allen and Henry Tilney, who teach her how to choose muslins and compose picturesque scenes, and are also extended by Catherine herself, who learns first from books and then by testing experience through trial and error. All this is obvious enough. The connections between Catherine's education and ours, however, are less obvious: so are those between two modes in Catherine's own development , the social (Bath) and the literary (Northanger Abbey). Here, to some critics, the coherence of the novel seems to break down, an event to be explained from Austen's biography. She did, after all, move from literary satire in her earliest works toward psychological and moral issues in her mature fiction: Northanger Abbey, in between the two, seems to look both ways, and Janus Austen fails where young Jane or mature Jane succeeded. I do not think that this is a necessary hypothesis, and I should like to devote the rest of this article to proposing a more flattering one, in which the tables are turned. That is, I propose that the strength ofNorthanger Abbey, and its theme, emerge from the connections between Catherine's education and ours, and between the social and literary modes in her experience. The connections are made peculiarly complex by Austen's granting Catherine an autonomy from the novel, of the sort that we readers naturally maintain. A look at the first chapter will suggest what I mean. There, a volley of innuendos about her future heroism makes one include under 'education' all Catherine's movements toward 'heroic' status, the freshening of her adolescent complexion as well as her growth in memorizing moral sentences. Much of Austen's irony at this point comes from her pretence that in real life, the life that her novel imitates, Catherine can 'learn to be a heroine: a category not proper to real life at all, but only to the repertoire of fiction. Superficially, such irony looks like a special irony of Fielding's, the 'transformation of a spontaneous UTQ, Volume XLIV, Number 1, Fall 1974 THE LESSONS OF NORTHANGER ABBEY 15 and impromptu action into one performed to accord with a formal pattern ... [which] imposes on the unthinking or spontaneous actions and deductions of the characters a strong suggestion of deliberations and definite intention; the instinctive and intuitional become conscious and purposeful.'1 But in Fielding, such a transformation is a means of enlarging the scope of expectations within which we see the character. As his diction grows more formal, trivia try on epic armour for size and so are given their proper measure within the limits of action. No matter how trivial Catherine mayor may not be, however, she cannot be given proper measure by trying on a heroine's furbelows, because the formal patterns that stand behind her spontaneous actions have no set value. Dignity, in Fielding, is at least a provisional norm; novelistic heroism in the first chapter ofNorthanger Abbey is not. As we see Catherine passing from infancy to mid-adolescence, we see the firm fact of her normality measuring the truth to nature of the sort of fiction which trades in heroines. The method of Fielding has been stood on its head so decisively that Catherine, in her nondescript childhood, becomes the main witness of Austen's own imitative truth to nature. In Northanger Abbey, then, the characters are declared to be logically prior to the fiction, and therefore ideally autonomous of it. Fielding establishes the world for Tom Jones; Catherine, as an index of normality, establishes the world for Austen, and thus exceeds the fiction in which she appears.' At...