Written when Jane Austen was in her late teens or early 20s, Northanger Abbey is a neat, light-hearted novel that gives the reader hints of Austen's independent thinking.
Believed to have been completed in 1803, the novel, though bought up by a publisher, languished for 13 years before it was finally published. By then, the author was already famous for her other five novels, and dead.
The Importance of Using Language Precisely
The heroine in Northanger Abbey is 17-year old Catherine Morland. Not terribly well-educated, mainly because her mother was continually giving birth, and also because she "often inattentive, and occasionally stupid". Catherine would much rather spend her time in tomboyish pursuits then in learning ladylike refinements.
It is when she is on holiday in the fashionable spa town of Bath that Catherine meets her hero, Henry Tilney. She waxes lyrical about her favourite reading material, describing her favourite gothic novel, Mrs Ann Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho, as "the nicest book in the world".
The better-educated Henry chides her for being so lax with language. The adjective "nice" is a lame word that could describe a walk, "neatness, propriety, delicacy or refinement", he observes. Now, Henry says, "every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word, nice.
Catherine's good friend, Isabella, whom she befriends in Bath, is also prone to using language loosely, describing many things as "horrid". It is yet another example of the lax use of language that Henry mocks.
Unimpressed by History
Stung by Henry's rebuke, Catherine exclaims that she can read poetry and plays, and she does not dislike travelogues. "But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in." She says, the quarrels of popes and kings weary her. "the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is all very tiresome."
Furthermore, her experience of education has been far chaotic and far from enjoyable. To Catherine's mind, history has been written merely to torment young children at school. |If you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together ... you would allow that 'to torment' and 'to instruct' might sometimes be used as synonymous words."
Henry allows her point, but counters that "historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read".
Learning to Read People
Throughout the novel, Catherine, who has not received much education in her life, is constantly looking for help in steering through the murky waters of social niceties. Forced to commit a social faux pas against the worldly Tilneys, by her false friends, Isabella and John Thorpe, Catherine is in agony because "she knew not how much an offense as hers might be classed by the laws of worldly politeness, to what a degree of unforgiveness it might with propriety lead".
Catherine fears that she might have to learn the rules of the adult social world in Bath, but Austen also shows us that she has an unerring instinct of people that is borne out by unfolding events.
So even though Austen informs us at the very beginning that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine", by novel's end, we have seen the transition from a young, gullible girl into a more instintive heroine whose dislike of John Thorpe and General Tilney is well-founded.
 |
