Northanger Abbey, ch. 5: A Novel Idea
Catherine is on Henry Watch. Unfortunately he isn’t making any appearances around Bath lately. This “mysteriousness, which is always so becoming in a hero, [throws] a fresh grace in Catherine’s imagination around his person and manners.” She says as much to Isabella Thorpe, now a fixed feature in her life at Bath. Isabella, always down for boy talk, proceeds to encourage Catherine’s crush on him and tries to change the subject to her own love life by sighing dramatically over her own “partial[ity]” towards clergymen. Catherine doesn’t pick up on this hint due to her inexperience about “the duties of friendship.”
But it sounds like she’s getting a crash course on those very duties: she and Isabella “[call] each other by their Christian name” (a sign of significant friendship), they’re “always arm in arm when they [walk],” and they refuse “to be divided in the set” when they attend a ball. Oh yeah. They’re those kind of friends. And when it’s too rainy to go out, they enjoy “read[ing] novels together.”
And here is where we leave the story until next chapter, because the narrator needs to get something off her chest. I’m going to break this down point by point:
Why are we talking about novels all of a sudden? “The novel” was still, er, novel during this time, and therefore had a not-spectacular reputation. Also, this section arrives just after the line about Catherine and Isabella having fun with reading, and given how much book-reading will influence Catherine later on, you could argue that this is meta-foreshadowing.
What’s the main argument the narrator is making? On the surface, the argument is that books are good, actually. Specifically, the argument is that books are good for young women to read, and far from the frivolous hobby it was purported to be. The narrator imagines a woman being forced to downplay her interest in front of a man: “‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.” The narrator argues that there are other literary forms that deserve more scorn than the novel, which is unfairly targeted by snobby critics.
Do novels need this kind of defense? Apparently, yes! The narrator claims that the novel disparaged even in other novels: some writers “scarcely ever [permit] 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.” David Shapard goes into great detail about the sexist notion held at the time that young women had too much imagination and risked over-stimulation by reading novels. “Denunciation of novels … is standard in all female conduct books at the time,” Shapard says. Poetry and nonfiction essays, by contrast, were held up as higher forms of art.
How is the narrator supporting this argument? Okay, so she pulls out examples like The Spectator and “the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England” as works that “are eulogized by a thousand pens” and contrasts them with novels such as “Cecilia,* or Camilla, or Belinda,” which are unfairly targeted by critics (not to mention, all written by women). Shapard’s description of The Spectator, a periodical that only ran for 3 years in the 1710s, makes it sound like a slightly more literary blog site of the 2010s (its authors also “adopted” a “condescending tone toward women”). Instead of regurgitating older information and extracts of well-known authors, the narrator states, a novel is a literary form “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 humor, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language.” (By “language,” I’m pretty sure she means composition, not English. But maybe not???)
Do we really have time for all this meta-commentary? Considering that Northanger Abbey is already rather slight in terms of page count, honestly I would’ve loved to see more of these asides. Its spirited defense of novels assures us that Catherine’s love of reading is valid and suggests that it will play a role in her gaining self-knowledge. Austen allows her heroine to enjoy reading instead of dismissing the activity as shallow to please some unidentified (male) reader. And it’s hard to ignore how much of the criticism—and the need to encourage reading—rings true today. Hmm, I wonder what Henry Tileny thinks of reading novels?
The Shapard Shelf: To give more context to Bath: “total population, according to the 1801 census, was approximately 33,000.” There was something called the “book of intelligence” kept in the Pump Room which all visitors signed. Curiously, Henry chose not to.
*I have yet to finish Cecelia, but I am a fan of Evelina, a novel by the same author, Frances Burney. Here’s me talking about why you should read it.
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