Abstract

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a defining feature of Bath is the absence of stable neighbors, and neighborhoods: like its historical counterpart, Northanger Abbey’s Bath is a city of visitors. At the same time, Austen’s novel alludes to a network of texts and spatial practices usefully understood in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s “codes of space,” which aim to orient new arrivals within the urban environment as well as within a constantly shifting social order. Austen herself shows the breakdown of such attempts at regulation, which creates dangerous misunderstandings regarding Catherine Morland’s status even as it affords her unexpected romantic opportunities. The other principle setting of the novel, Northanger Abbey, operates in opposition to Bath insofar as General Tilney aims at exercising ironclad control over not only his estate, but the neighborhood in which it is embedded. The novel’s principal locations of Bath and Northanger thus serve as two spatial extremes, one lacking altogether in “neighbors” and the other suffocated by the dominating patriarch who conflates his estate with its surroundings.

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