(Formerly) All Things Northanger Abbey

glamaphonic:

magpie’s nest: formerly-fyna: i absolutely adore catherine moreland just because she…

formerly-fyna:

i absolutely adore catherine moreland just because she exists, but i’d be lying if i didn’t say that i get an extra surge of love for her out of pure spite when people write about how they don’t like her because she’s ~whiny~ and ~stupid~. i mean, yeah she’s naive, but she also doesn’t need to be told how she feels (she knows she likes tilney; for a character who is so wrong about so many things she’s incredibly self aware). and she’s cute, damn it!

people keep on comparing her to lizzie bennet, who i love as well, as if lizzie is some perfect being who displays none of the flaws that catherine does. THIS IS SO WRONG. both ladies are deceived about the reality of their situations because of their imaginations. lizzie imagines darcy to be worse than he is because of the circumstances of their first meeting, and she imagines wickham to be better than he is because he compliments her and strokes her ego with his gossipy bad news about darcy. that’s what lizzie realizes when she says “did i know myself till now?” in the same way that part of the point of lizzie’s story is that she’s arrogant and judgmental to her own detriment, catherine gives herself over to fiction to her own detriment. they both read the world wrong: lizzie through her own prejudices and catherine through the lenses of novels. both are engaged with divesting themselves of fictions (catherine more tragically, in my opinion, because she gives up the passion with which she read novels, and gives up a large part of her imagination, and instead of learning to read novels properly she only learns to avoid them.)  (btw, catherine’s romance isn’t saved through the castigation of one of her family members, *cough*)

and if lizzie and catherine ever met they’d be friends. (charlotte would probably introduce them.)

also this whole lizzie vs catherine thing (am i imagining it?) plays into a lady vs lady thing, which is just gross. also stuff about how when i say i want a strong female heroine i don’t mean a heroine who is always right and runs around slitting people’s throats while screaming wildly across the plains a la xena (although i really reallylove ladies who run around slitting people’s throats, and xena warrior princess is a fav of mine) what i mean is a heroine who is a fully realized character and is allowed to have agency within the narrative and functions as more than just a vessel (i need a better word for this) for some other character

so yeah, catherine morland is awesome

it makes me sad but also does not surprise me at all that there are apparently human beings on this earth that somehow SOME WAY hate… catherine moreland?!?!?1?1?11

they both read the world wrong: lizzie through her own prejudices and catherine through the lenses of novels. 

Yes, thank you, this is a wonderful post and pitting Austen’s characters against each other is boring bullshit, but I would just like to add one thing about Catherine’s reading of the world that makes me love her a great deal.

Because yes, Catherine misinterprets and misunderstands a lot of the social cues around her through the frame of the gothic novel, but what’s really interesting is that she isn’t entirely wrong in her judgements.

She suspects General Tilney, with what is eventually revealed in the text to be good reason, because while he is not the kind of man who would murder his wife (well done, high bar), he is the kind of man who would suddenly throw a very young, vulnerable woman out of his home unaccompanied.

Catherine isn’t even given 24-hours notice that she will have to leave Northanger; there is not time to write for someone to meet and accompany her. She doesn’t even have any money, and only Eleanor’s intervention means she can pay for the expenses of travelling alone 70 miles by post-chaise to her home at Fullerton. General Tilney may not be a murderer, but he is not a good man, and Catherine’s suspicion of him is not entirely unjustified.

Likewise, Catherine’s discomfort with Thorpe, who twists social convention to force his unwelcome presence on her, and as the OP points out, her self-conscious admiration of Tilney; Catherine has fairly good instincts about people, which, yes, are distorted by her relationships with gothic texts [so much so that her relationship with Isabella is in part so positive because they read the same books- Catherine’s esteem for the novels transfers to esteem to Isabella].

So despite her misinterpretations, Catherine’s good instincts are there nonetheless and are generally borne out  by the text. Northanger Abbey is great because it’s not about ‘oh stupid girl shouldn’t read novels or form her own opinions’, it’s ‘young inexperienced girl gains the experience to be able to make and trust her own judgements when discerning between social lies, fiction and truth’. 

And this is a wonderful thing in Elizabeth Bennet’s story as well, in that while she certainly makes an error in judgement regarding Darcy and Wickham’s characters, she is also shown to be a perceptive and accurate judge of character in others (her analysis of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh comes to mind, and even of Mr. Bennet).

Elizabeth is brilliant and satiric and perceptive; prejudice distorts her good judgement, but like Catherine, the text never suggests that one error means that all of her judgements are invalid. It’s not an all or nothing equation.

Both Catherine and Elizabeth form misconceptions about others, but they are neither of them shown to be completely misguided and incorrect about the world - it’s not absolute. They make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, because they are strong well-written female characters, and making mistakes is kind of what human beings do.

(And Catherine would totally be in awe of and in love with Elizabeth and would read every book Elizabeth ever even vaguely alluded to and it would be charming and wonderful. Tilney would have to suffer through Collins while Elizabeth, Charlotte and Catherine talked, but he might enjoy it because it would give him marvellous opportunities to be ironic over Collins’ head.)

slattern:

delladilly:

slattern:

actually, moresleighbells’ post about further modern austen adaptations a la the LBD makes me want a northanger abbey adaptation! catherine would so be in to a vlog. and a tumblr. and a goodreads account (she’s totally devoured the twilight books) 

it could be so charming and cute!

OH MY GOD her midnight vlog posts from under the covers like in cahoots with the viewer I MUST CONFIDE IN YOU MY SUSPICIOUS THEORIES HENCE I AM GONE BEFORE THESE WICKED TRIPPING HOURS TO DAWN

#she never said that but she would #northanger abbey #MY SECOND FAVORITE AUSTEN NOVEL #now i am going to live in heightened desperate anticipation of a vlog thx tumblr user slattern

lolol go ahead and blame me because i blame myself too — i want it so bad now! i mean, can you imagine her enthusiasm and melodramatics? and general sweetness?  it would also be a really interesting change from the lizzie bennet diaries, since lizzie is a more cynical heroine. 

and i have to say, catherine would be so much fun to adapt into a modern, internet fandom setting! i mean, she’s basically a nerd. and she would be so excited by the things that happen around her, making them sound so much cooler and potentially thrilling than they actually are!

omg she would be SO EARNEST about EVERYTHING like ALL THE TIME, like wow literal feelings blog, she would overanalyze everything with overwide eyes and laugh a lot and vamp at the camera

maybe instead of costume theater she would do hand puppets

maybe instead of henry tilney she would fall in love with henrietta tilney like sly clever sweet patient adoring henrietta tilney who is just a little tall with a sharp face and sort of spiky dark hair 

can you imagine henrietta tilney

bcs i do

(Source: lady-stoneheart)

countessmary:

Re the screen cap I just reblogged:

No, it’s not [possible to read too many novels]! And much as I adore this adaptation, I wish it hadn’t gone down the tempting interpretation of swinging from one extreme to another in regards to novel reading. Catherine in the novel never burns Udolpho and there’s no sign that she’s going to stop reading after she marries Henry. (Can you imagine? Actually he’ll be reading Radcliffe out loud to her in bed doing all the voices and Catherine will be in heaven and being deliciously scared and sometimes his voice will shake because he’s trying not to laugh and she’ll know he is but will pretend not to notice.)

The moral of NA isn’t that you shouldn’t read novels, it’s to learn how to read them properly (if there is a “proper” way of reading). And in many ways Catherine learns important lessons from the novels, more than she learns from Henry who frequently tries to misrepresent her. (He insists she keeps a journal when she says she doesn’t, hopes that a love of flowers will get her outdoors when she needs no encouragement.) The greatest lesson Catherine learns in the novel is:

Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel, that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.

It is from Gothic novels that Catherine learns the emotional truths of life - which I suppose was the point of the “different kinds of vampirism” comment in the film. It’s a vitally important message for young, female readers of novels in Austen’s days.

The established male critics of the day hated that women read these sensational novels - novels in which girls defied their parents, had adventures, married their lovers, and then lived happily ever after; novels which made literal the imprisonment and tyranny that was part of so many women’s lives by setting the stories in castles in Italy far removed from the polite drawing rooms of middle England. They thought that reading these novels gave women ideas. To counteract these sensational novels, there were many moral novels and what were called quixotic novels. These were about heroines who read too many novels, started to think their life was a novel, made terrible mistakes and eventually realised they were stupid to read these awful novels, give them up to settle down with a nice, dull man they overlooked in the first place. And patriarchy was appeased.

In allowing Catherine to keep her moral compass through the novel and to actually realise the real use of Gothic novels and learn from them is actually a subversive act on Austen’s part, dressed up in a standard quixotic novel. Catherine burningUdolpho and admitting that it is possible to read too many novels (a line not in the original text) is simplying NA into a much more simple quixotic novel.

And that seems an important distinction to me when fiction aimed at women is still being trashed (sci-fi? serious genre; romance? rubbish) and is said to be harmful to them.

Have we really moved on?

What we need is a Northanger Abbey for the Twilight generation. Not more book burning.

delladilly:

slattern:

actually,moresleighbells’ postabout further modern austen adaptations a la the LBD makes me want a northanger abbey adaptation! catherine would so be in to a vlog. and a tumblr. and a goodreads account (she’s totally devoured the twilight books) 

it could be so charming and cute!

OH MY GOD her midnight vlog posts from under the covers like in cahoots with the viewer I MUST CONFIDE IN YOU MY SUSPICIOUS THEORIES HENCE I AM GONE BEFORE THESE WICKED TRIPPING HOURS TO DAWN

#she never said that but she would#northanger abbey#MY SECOND FAVORITE AUSTEN NOVEL#now i am going to live in heightened desperate anticipation of a vlog thx tumblr user slattern

lolol go ahead and blame me because i blame myself too — i want it so bad now! i mean, can you imagine her enthusiasm and melodramatics? and general sweetness?  it would also be a really interesting change from the lizzie bennet diaries, since lizzie is a more cynical heroine. 

and i have to say, catherine would be so much fun to adapt into a modern, internet fandom setting! i mean, she’s basically a nerd. and she would be so excited by the things that happen around her, making them sound so much cooler and potentially thrilling than they actually are!

somebody make this happen

(Source: lady-stoneheart, via lady-stoneheart)

But within Austen’s works, even those who approve of novels are capable of describing them in terms of their packaging. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney describes the typical gothic novel as “‘a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern’” (NA Vol. I Ch. XIV). The images below are from frontispieces to two different gothic novels published in the 1800s, when gothic fiction was purportedly beginning to decline. Though these works are by two different authors of different genders writing in different years, both frontispieces contain the same major elements—a skeleton, a young man, a lantern—and both title pages label their works as “gothic romances.”

The above images suggest that publishers went out of their way to make genre visibly identifiable, so that prospective readers could judge books, if not by their covers, then at least by their frontispieces and other forms of “packaging.” Furthermore, Austen’s reference to this practice suggests her interest in the idea of form—both the ways in which it was conceived by publishers trying to sell novels and the ways in which it was evaluated by potential readers who might be interested in purchasing or borrowing novels.

The next image is the cover for a 1960s American reprint of Northanger Abbey that’s been packaged as a gothic novel, rather than as the gothic satire it really is. Most of the cover text is excerpted directly from the text of Austen’s novel, albeit with a few additions (you won’t find any “distant screams” in the original). What interests me about this particular cover is the way in which it could lead potential readers to misjudge the text; those who expect a gothic novel would likely be disappointed.

In this context, Austen’s concern with her characters’, and, in fact, her own readers’ ability to evaluate forms is unsurprising. Northanger Abbey tells the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland’s first visit to Bath, where she is introduced into society for the first time and meets two important figures: Henry Tilney, an eligible young clergyman with whom she is quickly infatuated, and Isabella Thorpe, a young woman who befriends Catherine and introduces her to the gothic novel. This subgenre of the novel had risen to prominence in the 1790s and was perceived as a genre often written and almost always read by women. It was also criticized by many as having completely unrealistic plots that depended upon the same generic tropes and characters regardless of who wrote it. If those frontispieces are anything to go by, this may have been fairly valid criticism; nonetheless, Catherine’s fascination with the gothic novel leads her to believe that her own life ought to be full of supernatural mysteries and horrifying set-pieces—skeletons, dark corridors, ancient castles, and abbeys.

When Catherine is invited to visit with Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor at their home, Northanger Abbey, she’s certain that her own gothic adventure is just beginning. She expects from the first moment of her visit that

Something was certainly to be concealed; her fancy, though it had trespassed lately once or twice, could not mislead her here; and what that something was, a short sentence of Miss Tilney’s, as they followed the General at some distance down stairs, seemed to point out:—“I was going to take you into what was my mother’s room—the room in which she died—” were all her words; but few as they were, they conveyed pages of intelligence to Catherine. (NA Vol. II Ch. VIII)

The logic is simple: if Catherine were in a gothic novel, the phrase spoken to her by her friend Eleanor would have suggested foul play. In this case, it leads Catherine to believe that Henry and Eleanor’s mother, dead for nine years, was actually murdered by their father, General Tilney. Austen uses this assumption to cannily represent the way in which genre can function as shorthand for the reader; a “short sentence,” translated through Catherine’s gothic imagination, results in “pages of intelligence,” which, though ultimately incorrect when applied to the real world, would be a perfect fit for one of the novels Catherine reads.

It takes Henry Tilney’s horrified response to Catherine’s assumption to show her that she isn’t living inside one of her novels. He catches her exploring his mother’s old room and reacts with shock when she questions him about the circumstances of the late Mrs. Tilney’s death, ultimately chastising her into seeing sense. Against the “dreadful nature of the suspicions [Catherine] has entertained,” Henry juxtaposes a “sense of the probable” and “observation of what is passing” in the real world (NA Vol. II Ch. IX). He draws a distinction between the form of the gothic novel and the form of life, and seems to deny any crossover between the two.

Although at first glance it might appear that Henry Tilney is the “good reader” we have all been waiting for, who will teach Catherine how to distinguish between the forms of fiction and reality, a closer look reveals that both Henry and Catherine go out of their way to make real life conform to conventional expectations. The only difference is that Catherine unreservedly inhabits the tropes of the gothic novel, while Henry’s knowing deployment of social rituals calls attention to the unnaturalness of the forms he follows.

Henry and Catherine’s first conversation revolves entirely around Henry’s understanding of what is “proper” for dance partners who have just been introduced:

After chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them, he suddenly addressed her with—“I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”

“You need not give yourself that trouble, sir.”

“No trouble I assure you, madam.” Then forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering air, “Have you been long in Bath, madam?” (NA Vol. I Ch. III)

Thus begins a series of rote questions that one assumes to be a sharp contrast to the conversation Henry and Catherine had been engaged in previously. Instead of discussing “such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them,” Henry’s new mode of conversation is “set” and “affected”—in other words, quite unnatural—but he insists upon going through with it because it represents the “proper attentions” that must be expressed. The text draws attention to the fact that this necessary conversation, carried out completely in keeping with conventional forms, doesn’t actually say much of anything.

This returns us to one of the first questions we asked: if Austen had no moral qualms about circulating libraries or novels, why present the circulating library as a place for Lydia to gossip, and the novel as a form that can be read from its cover? Given the evidence, it becomes clear that Austen is not criticizing the form of the novel as much as she is criticizing those who can’t look past or through the form to evaluate the substance and reality it encodes. Texts like Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudiceallow Austen to critique readers who place their faith in outward forms, ranging from gothic frontispieces to uniformed soldiers to established social conventions. Austen inhabits the form of the novel in order to draw attention to the formulae which govern novelistic presentation of scenes and characters. She engages in a calculated deployment of common novel tropes in such a way that their status as tropes is called attention to. In this way, she makes her readers aware of their own expectations of form and genre by subtly upsetting those expectations.

I read Northanger Abbey for the first time slightly over a month ago in preparation for my senior thesis on Jane Austen and the form of the novel, and ever since then I’ve been going back and forth about what I think of the novel’s purported “hero” Henry Tilney. I find the protagonist Catherine to be simple in a cute sort of way—strong-minded and genuine in her opinions even when she’s not willing to speak up and assert them, young and a bit naïve but without it being really infuriating—but Henry is a mystery that I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around.

Part of this, I suspect, can be blamed upon the BBC. I hadn’t readNorthanger Abbey a month and a half ago, but I had seen the 2007 TV movie starring Felicity Jones and J. J. Field. I’d found it to be much like its heroine (short, cute, fun), and almost like Pride and Prejudice lite (all the wordplay and banter but none of the ferocious arguments or long-held grudges). In the film, Field’s Henry Tilney is affable, and he delivers his character’s more questionable lines with a smile that makes you forget that he’s not making sense. I bought into Tilney’s silliness as a result of the film, and went into the novel expecting to find him, if nothing else, a good match for Catherine, willing to tease her and challenge her in such a way that would promote their developing relationship as well as the intelligence of both individuals.

I came away from my first reading of the novel with a pretty favorable account of him. He was a little more jokey, and a little more likely to cut others off for the sake of expressing his own intelligence, than I had expected, but his playful humor left me feeling that he was, in a strange way, a male prototype for Elizabeth Bennet. The language used to describe them is, in fact, incredibly similar. Henry is introduced as having “a very intelligent and lively eye,” “fluency and spirit,” and “an archness and pleasantry…which interested” (NA Vol. I Ch. III). In comparison, Darcy relates that Elizabeth’s countenance “was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 6), with “a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 10). Just as Henry teases Catherine by asking her a series of rote questions about her enjoyment of Bath, Elizabeth pursues conversation-by-formula with Darcy during their dance at the Netherfield ball. They are both witty jokesters who wouldn’t be able to stand having many acquaintances at whom they were not allowed to laugh…