Mortality In Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey'

Dr. John Halbrooks
EH 421
21 November 2016
Fictionality and Forgiveness
Fictionality is relationship between the author and the reader. As readers, we trust the author to be honest in revealing their stories to us. However, often times they are exploring with concepts or conventions that we are not even aware of until the ending. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, she has produced a commentary on the gothic novel while using Catherine Morland is the inexperienced young heroine who expects the real world to follow the formula of her favorite novels. Ian McEwan uses Briony who is naïve in her own right, but much more controlling, believing that she is right about everything at only 13 years old. Both of these novels use different tactics to
draw in the reader while subversively including writing about writing. Both of these novels play with author/reader relationship by planting clues using irony, as in Northanger Abbey, or point of view like in Atonement. Both stories are about women young dealing with mystery and ideals of their own minds, which are not always indicated as truth in the real world.
Simone de Beauvoir’s essay, entitled “The Second Sex,” postulates that much of the “mystery” surrounding women is but a way for men to continue to degrade and subjugate women as the “second,’ or lesser, sex. While Catherine is exploring the new world of adulthood in Bath, she meets other young women, Isabella Thorpe and Eleanor Tilney, who are polar opposites. While Isabella spends her days manipulating those around her, and pretending not to notice the young men, she is also carefree and fun for Catherine. Eleanor, on the other hand, is nice, if a bit boring. Eleanor is also the archetypal gothic heroine, whose mother died when she was young, and encountered a Viscount to marry who seemed just appear from nowhere in the novel. Austen is critiquing the traditional gothic heroine as plain and predictable, unlike Isabella who is the antithesis of the type. To pair this against de Beauvoir’s essay, we can see that women are not “shrouded in mystery,” and there are all different kinds of women in this novel and in the world. To stay these women are nothing more than mystery is an excuse for men to avoid getting to know them properly, and then place themselves as the higher, more advanced sex. By placing them in the category of “other,” men are removing women from their rightful place as thinkers and world-changers. At its core, Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a satire of the conventions of the gothic novel, which had significant popularity in the eighteenth century.
They would typically include a young woman in distress at the hands of a dark and powerful man. These were set usually in mysterious castle with secrets and passageways. Catherine Morland, our “unexpected” heroine in Northanger Abbey, is an ordinary young woman of 17. Austen’s first description of her materializes how normal she is. Her father, a clergy-man, earned a good and honest living for their family. Catherine was not outstanding in regards to physical appearance and average intelligence and she was a bit of a tomboy growing up, until puberty struck and she began to care about her appearance and gave way to more elegant activities, such as reading novels. It is in these novels that Catherine bases her knowledge of the world, and the reader’s first taste of Austen’s satirical sword. For a young, naïve woman, reading gothic novels where women are snatched from their homes, or reading old men’s poetry which tended to illustrate women as nothing more than “pretty,” Catherine’s ideas of the real world grow to be skewed and unrealistic as she journeys to Bath on her own at the care of Mrs. Allen, a family friend.
Austen’s narration describes Catherine “being aware” of herself as a heroine, and hopes that her journey to bath will successfully put a hero in her story, which is, once again, Austen toying with the fictionality of
her novel with Catherine being determined to find herself a hero. She laments that her village had not produced one young man of high-standing or even young man who had been dropped at a family’s door, and other well known gothic and fairytale conventions of men appearing for the sole purpose of wooing a woman to marry them. Austen was aware of exactly how she was framing the characters of her novel. Catherine’s mother does not worry too much about her daughter’s first extended trip away from home, rather she just asks that Catherine use a scarf and be frugal with the money they have given her while she is away. While Catherine is at Northanger Abbey, she opens a mysterious cupboard in her room, expecting to find something horrible inside, and only finds a pile of old laundry bills. She discovers the late Mrs. Tilney’s, a woman who she is convinced was killed by her husband, the materialistic, brusque General Tilney, bedroom and finds nothing of importance, playing against the expectation of the reader to find some kind of proof of a horrible act that ended her life. Part of the parody is that, while framed inside the mind of Catherine’s Gothic conventions, Austen continues to shock the readers with the amount of normalcy in Catherine’s life, reminding us that all of the conventions that Catherine is so passionate about finding do not exist, and are instead the product of her own life inexperience. It is also upon finding Catherine’s in his mother’s bedroom where Henry delivers his famous speech, pleading Catherine to place herself back into the reality of their world, as Christian English people. Austen, while orchestrating the scene for Catherine’s hero to expose her naive mind, is giving a speech to remind readers of the improbability of the tropes that gothic novels did portray. While analytically being illustrations of the different types of women in the world, Austen uses the women of Bath inside the novel as parodies of the way women were treated throughout literature. Mrs. Allen, who longs for friendship in Bath, but never goes out of her way to initiate contact with another woman, is often dramatizing trivial matters, like the weather or their clothes. Mrs. Allen exclaims that when the sky looked like it may rain, it would have “thrown [her] into agonies.” These stereotypes can be harmful to women, but as Simone de Beauvoir postulates in her essay “Myths and Realities,” the idea that women are mysteries is a myth, and I believe that when Austen created the two-dimensional Mrs. Allen, she made a point to make her the least mysterious character in the novel. Isabella tells Catherine that boys gazing at the in the cafe make her uncomfortable, and yet follows them out into the town in hopes that they will continue to look at her. Eleanor lives with her domineering father in hopes that she will one find a man of high status to marry, which she does. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, we meet Briony Tallis, a young girl who dreams of becoming a famous novelist. She bears many of the personality traits of being a writer, first and foremost, a God complex. Briony is obsessed with creating a world she can control, or “possessed by a desire to have the world just so,” and as we see in the ending, this was most likely as a mechanism for coping with the reality of the world she could not. She considers herself to be above everyone else, and the thought of other people given the same “power” to control themselves is offensive to her ideals of neatness, tidiness, and “just-so-ness,” and Robbie’s letter violates every one of the tenants of her world. She likes the loose end of the world to be tied up in neat little bows, and pieces of puzzles easy to distinguish, and she utilizes those characteristics while finding the easiest possible answer for Lola’s assault: Robbie, the young man who just wrote her sister a sexually explicit letter. McEwan gives Briony the naivety that Austen’s Catherine also shares. Briony believes that the world works in black or white, and there is no such thing as a shade of gray. She realizes her mistake the night that Robbie is falsely arrested and imprisoned, and while she wanted to believe that by being jailed, Robbie will “atone” for his “attack” on her sister, what McEwan has done is placed Briony is her own cycle of atonement. Knowing that she is the actual write of the novel, she begins the final chapter of Part One saying, “How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.” This is actually a blatant clue that McEwan is shifting the author-reader relationship behind the scenes, which one would not find out until the end of the novel, when Briony is revealed as author.
McEwan included the speech given by Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey as the epigraph of his novel, and the most striking of the lines, “What have you been judging from? Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare is for such atrocities?” Austen uses this speech to remind us (and Catherine) that the real world is not filled with terrible acts, like kidnapping, or the murder of wives, or abduction. However, McEwan uses it to illustrate exactly how realistic those conventions could be. Briony’s lie causes Robbie to be unjustly “abducted” from the Tallis’s property and sent to prison only then to attempt to earn his freedom by fighting for Britain, only to be killed. In Northanger Abbey, after being discovered as a naïve girl with false intimations toward the world, she cries “tears of shame,” as does McEwan’s Briony when she realizes that she can never atone for her sins, and attempts to create a new life for Robbie and Cecilia in her novel, a place where they can get their happy ending. Because Henry
When reading Atonement and contemplating Briony’s obsession with being able to create a perfect world, or atonement, I was reminded of Plato’s theory of the Forms. While Briony, after failing to control what Plato calls the “material world,” she creates the novel, which is her version of the “transcendent world,” a version where Cecilia and Robbie both come out of the war unharmed and are reunited. In the last section, Briony reveals herself as the author of Atonement, but she also admits that she is not entirely truthful. As an unreliable narrator, she, like McEwan, has shifted the author/reader relationship to the point where reader questions exactly at what point Briony begins lying during the story, and therefore McEwan is lying to us, as well. He changes the dynamic by cryptically signing the end of Part II with “BT, London, 1999.” Initially, this is only a small “blip” on our reader’s radar. After reading Part III, we realize that Briony, who has become a young nurse and had been attempting to get published during the war. The signature alerts the reader that Briony has been working on this novel for over 40 years, and all this toil has been part of her atonement for lying about Robbie. In her novel, Cecilia does not immediately forgive her, which Briony did on purpose in order to punish herself for her lie for as long as her novel exists. While Briony would have thought herself to be above creating a novel with a happy-ending love story for Robbie and Cecilia, what she has actually created is her atonement. The couple is alive and well, but by not forgiving Briony, she, as the creator of the world, has placed herself in a position of guilt even in her transcendent world. Plato would agree with Briony that her novel is a much more permanent atonement than any apology.
He theorizes the plane of Forms, a place only reached with mind, is complete perfection, where humans have attempted to recreate it only to fail. While constructing her novel, this world that she has created as the perfect story, will exist longer than the one in which she lied, and sent an innocent man to die in World War I and her estranged sister to die in a subway station during a bombing. The story created in the mind of Briony is much more permanent to Plato, as it the form found in the Transcendent plane, that we would attempt to mimic in the material
world.