Romance in Northanger Abbey
This Novel is Jane Austen’s Ode to Shakespeare and Ann Radcliffe
Jul 10, 2009
Jane Austen presents hard-fought arguments about the validity of the novel as a literary form. It is obvious that she herself has enjoyed many years of novel-reading, for she speaks with great authority.
She was influenced by such writers as Ann Radcliffe, whom Edgar Allen Poe later read with great abandon, and Northanger Abbey could be said to be a result of her love for and an ode to gothic novels.
The Joys of Novels
- Jane Austen defends novels against all nay-sayers, addressing readers directly: “Let us leave it to the Reviewers [sic] to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.”
- She talks of the value of intellectual publications, but bemoans that novels are considered so worthy of criticism: “Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.”
- She also argues with the fact that novels are for silly, vapid women only and not for men to read, by having both the heroine and hero be avid novel readers: “But you never read novels, I dare say?” (said Catherine Morland.) “Why not?” (said Henry Tilney.) “Because they are not clever enough for you; gentlemen read better books.” “The person, be it gentlemen or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Art and Creativity
In Jane Austen’s day, it was considered part of a higher education to be able to draw and to know about aspects of art.
Her heroine in Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, did not apply herself as a young girl, and therefore is not proficient or skilled when it comes to drawing.
- But she is a quick and willing student, as Henry Tilney, the book’s hero, finds out: “The Tilneys were soon engaged in another, on which (Catherine) had nothing to say. They were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing; and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste. Here Catherine was quite lost.”
- Catherine listened closely to the discussion of Henry Tilney and his sister, and began to change her ideas about drawing and art. “In the present instance, (Catherine) confessed and lamented her want of knowledge; declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a
- lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him; … he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste.”
- “Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”
- And, not for poetry to be left out in a discussion of art, in words worthy of a sonnet, Jane Austen lightly declares: “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
The Graces of Gothic Influences and Inferences
Catherine Morland is thrilled when the Tilney family invites her to stay with them in their home, Northanger Abbey.
- She immediately begins forming ideas about it: “She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be for weeks under the same roof with the person whose society she mostly prized; and in addition to all the rest, this roof was to be the roof of an abbey!”
- Amazed at her good luck that her destination was to be neither house, nor park, nor place, nor court, but an abbey, Catherine Morland’s mind soars to flights of fancy: “Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.”
- However, Jane Austen keeps the mood of Northanger Abbey light, lighter, in fact, that most of her books, especially later ones, such as Persuasion. The serious tone of many classic gothic novels does not prevail here. She is playful, almost, in her description and discussion of various characters, especially the more ridiculous ones: “This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself … which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters.”
Jane Austen makes it clear that she finds great merit and indeed comfort in novels, and speaks of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as if it is an old friend.
And that is how booklovers are, their books becoming personal friends to them.
Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey definitely to defend the novel as a literary form, to mix in some of her beloved gothic elements, and to discuss in general the ideas of what rendered an education fit or unfit in her day.
It is a comfort, indeed, to readers today to know that Jane Austen was an avid reader, and that one can sit down with the same books that she read as a young girl and loved for her entire life.
Source: Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
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