The Lessons of Northanger Abbey

Abstract

In Northanger Abbey, as in a number of works of eighteenth-century fiction (say, Tom Jones), the protagonist and the reader undergo parallel, but in almost no way identical, educations. The reader, as Austen's irony announces in the first paragraph, is to be led toward something better than the conventional novels to which she alludes again and again in the course of the book. As to the protagonist, the first chapter offers a dry account of Catherine's progress in music and drawing; these early lessons are extended by Mrs Allen and Henry Tilney, who teach her how to choose muslins and compose picturesque scenes, and are also extended by Catherine herself, who learns first from books and then by testing experience through trial and error. All this is obvious enough. The connections between Catherine's education and ours, however, are less obvious: so are those between two modes in Catherine's own development, the social (Bath) and the literary (Northanger Abbey). Here, to some critics, the coherence of the novel seems to break down, an event to be explained from Austen's biography. She did, after all, move from literary satire in her earliest works toward psychological and moral issues in her mature fiction: Northanger Abbey, in between the two, seems to look both ways, and Janus Austen fails where young Jane or mature Jane succeeded. I do not think that this is a necessary hypothesis, and I should like to devote the rest of this article to proposing a more flattering one, in which the tables are turned. That is, I propose that the strength of Northanger Abbey, and its theme, emerge from the connections between Catherine's education and ours, and between the social and literary modes in her experience.