Jane Austen Claps Back

Clapping Back to Misogyny, part four

This is the kind of withering look that you might expect that she would give to men like John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey.

In Chapter Five of Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen does something unexpected. Our unlikely heroine, Catherine Morland, (and the narrator has spent much of the first four chapters explaining why she is unlikely) has made a new friend, Isabella Thorpe, during her sojourn in Bath. Isabella is bad news, though Catherine does not yet realize this, and they spend much time together, even during inclement weather, when “they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.”

The unexpected thing is that our author interrupts her narrative, steps out of the frame, and addresses the reader directly with a long paragraph of literary theory, or literary manifesto, delivered in sly, Austenian style:

Yes, novels;—for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect patronage and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers 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. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

It is highly unusual for Austen to step away from her narrative like this, and the passage continues from there at some length, but perhaps some context might help explain this strident moment. Northanger Abbey was the first of her mature works that she completed, but it was not published until shortly after her death, when it appeared in the same volume as Persuasion. It differs in tone from all of her other novels. (Actually, you could make this claim about each of her books, but the difference here is more pronounced.) As she was drafting the book originally, the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe were all the rage, but by the time it was published they had fallen out of fashion. In fact, in her author’s note, she explains these changes in fashion between the time of writing and the time of publication. Northanger is an affectionate and playful parody of the gothic novel, as Catherine imagines throughout that she is living through a narrative like Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, only to discover that her real life is in most ways quite different but in some ways quite analogous to her imagined one.

Such novels were not held in high regard by the intellectual elite. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, wrote this about those who read popular novels:

For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility [. . .]

Furthermore, this criticism tended to be quite sharply gendered: novels were considered time-wasting entertainment, largely written by women and for women, and, therefore, were not to be taken seriously. What should young women read instead for their betterment? Books of aphorisms and quotations, conduct books, and improving essays. In the first chapter of Northanger, the narrator describes Catherine’s education as essentially a series of decontextualized quotations from the “great authors.” She finds all of it tiresome, and understandably so. She prefers novels.

The gendered nature of such a preference is clear also as Austen contrasts the critical response to the novel as a form against “the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne,” which is “eulogized by a thousand pens.” Notice that it’s “the man” who produces such a book, while all of the novels that she cites in the passage were written by women—specifically Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. These novels, belittled by the critical establishment, are books “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

In the course of the next few chapters, the reader is able to use characters’ various tastes in reading as a barometer of their moral standing and intelligence. Whereas the caddish braggart John Thorpe professes to hate novels, the clever and (relatively) sensible Henry Tilney claims that a “person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” To put this sentence in the mouth of her hero is a brilliant clap-back to the misogynistic reviewers (and to the more apathetic students in my classroom), but readers must be careful here, lest they mistake Tilney for an author surrogate—which he certainly is not.

While Tilney is generally a good fellow, he clearly sees novels as harmless entertainment, as opposed to something to take seriously. When he wants to learn something, he turns to history, which Catherine dislikes reading, but in her innocent expression of distaste, she actually poses a powerful criticism of historical writing of the time:

I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.

It’s difficult to imagine a more concise, devastating attack on the “great man” theory of history than this one. Novels, on the other hand, have the potential for Catherine to fill in the vast gaps of domestic life and the female experience left by the masculine historians. Catherine is eager to learn, but the historians are not teaching what she wants to know.

And it is this desire to learn that seems to make her attractive to Tilney, which is suggested by one of those incomparable Austenian sentences that sets up certain readerly expectations only to dismantle them with the very last word of the last clause:

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance.

What does the reader expect this final word to be, in contrast to “imbecility”? “Virtue”? “Docility”? “Beauty”? No, instead we get “ignorance,” which is preferable to imbecility for reasonable men because it suggests the capacity to learn, whereas “imbecility” conveys fixed stupidity. Henry Tilney likes Catherine, at least in part, because he will be able to mansplain to her. He is not the equal of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, who learns as much from Elizabeth as she learns from him.

Tilney is no Darcy.

But Catherine knows a thing or two, even if she doesn’t realize this yet. For one thing, she accurately assesses the dark character of General Tilney, Henry’s monstrous father, even if she misjudges the nature of his past deeds. While she imagines him guilty of the sorts of crimes committed in gothic novels, he is actually selfish and tyrannical in a more mundane sort of way: “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.”

She has not yet lived long enough to balance the insights that she derives from reading novels with firsthand experience of life—but she will learn. By the time we reach the end of the novel, she has been treated badly by two toxic men, and she has also witnessed the behavior of Henry’s older brother, who treats women like so many playthings to be used and discarded.

In this narrative context, Austen’s manifesto in favor of novels seems even more of a clap-back against misogyny. She would have the last laugh, as the novel form ascended to respectability and beyond through the course of the nineteenth century, and for exactly the reasons that she articulates: the novel, more than any other literary form, is able to convey what Henry James would call a “felt impression of life,” but it also provides a space to document feminine lived experience more thoroughly and accurately than earlier narrative modes.

The peek that Austen gives us into her strongly held critical views provides a useful contrast to the more subtle ways in which they work into her other novels. Because of this subtlety, she does not always receive her due as a proto-feminist. As Rebecca West writes of Northanger Abbey, “it is characteristic of Jane Austen’s art that she presents this story, which was the fruit of strong feeling and audacious thought, with such perfect serenity that one accepts it as a beautiful established fact.” Austen does, however, in this one moment, speak directly to us, and she allows us to glimpse the anger behind that serenity—and it is glorious.

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In case you have missed them, you may find the other pieces in this series here:

• Part one, an introduction

• Part two, on Christine de Pizan

• Part three, on the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (guest post by Laura Vrana)

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Sebastien LE DEROUT on Unsplash