Northanger Abbey, chapter 7: Johnny-Come-Lately (Preferably Not At All)

There are details about Austen novels that drive me to distraction. Whenever I find myself agreeing with Emma Woodhouse. Whether or not Captain Harville and Anne would have made a good couple. And one detail about Northanger Abbey that drives me batty is just this one thing ...

Why is John Thorpe?

Everything about this guy is a mess. He arrives on the scene in a fury, cutting off Catherine and Isabella with his stampeding gig, and then stubbornly contradicts his companion (Catherine’s brother—hi, James!) in judging the distance they have traveled. The narrator’s description doesn’t save his image: John possesses “a plain face and ungraceful form” and doesn’t know how to dress himself.

He immediately attaches himself to Catherine without so much as a proper introduction. He invites her to ride in his gig (an inappropriate invitation), offers “a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every woman they met,” and calls his sisters ugly to their faces. He also talks Catherine’s ear off about how much the gig cost him (it was “neither” “cheap or dear,” making it the Goldilocks of gigs) and is generally a loudmouth who says anything even if it means sounding like a hypocrite (he admits it was only 23 miles after all that they traveled). Whatta charmer. 

Catherine, torn between her love of Isabella and her own doubts, doesn’t know how to respond to Mr. Thorpe’s steamrolling. “[F]earful of hazarding an opinion,” Catherine does her best to change the subject to books, obsessed as she is with Udolpho. John Thorpe scoffs at the idea of novels before declaring himself a fan of The Monk and Tom Jones. He then goes on to bash Camilla after having read the first chapter (Monk and Jones were written by men and Camilla was written by a woman, a fact that for some reason I feel compelled to add). 

Meanwhile, James Morland and Isabella Thorpe find one another more palatable. (James deftly side-steps his sister’s innocent assumption that he came to Bath to see her—he’s there to see Isabella.) It fails to register to Catherine that “her brother thought her friend quite as pretty as she could do herself.” James raves to his sister that Isabella “she has so much good sense, and is so thoroughly unaffected and amiable,” signaling to us that his infatuation is pretty far gone. Like, Isabella is friendly-ish, sure, but “unaffected”? Neither Morland sibling clock that Isabella is still checking out those two young men she was hoping to catch up with in the previous chapter. Methinks the Morland family needs to sharpen their observation skills. 

Catherine’s distaste for John Thorpe wavers since he’s the brother of her best friend and the best friend of her brother. Isabella happily reports that John expects to dance with Catherine later that evening. “[H]ad there been no friendship and no flattery in the case,” she wouldn’t bother with him. An “older or vainer” woman wouldn’t be impressed with John’s casual admiration, but … well, this is Catherine. Even she’s not so distracted by Udolpho that she doesn’t feel the “felicity” in having a dance partner. After all, Henry Tilney hasn’t been around lately, so she doesn’t have anyone to compare John with.

Will John surprise her by being a good dance partner? The ballrooms of Bath await!

The Shapard Shelf: Shapard spends a lot of time picking apart John Thorpe’s contradictions and double-talk. Thorpe’s choice in novels are characteristic of him: Tom Jones boasts a “ribald and salacious tone” and “an exciting and eventful plot,” which speak to Thorpe’s coarseness and aggressive personality. The Monk is a “lurid” and “highly controversial” novel that “exemplifies what most of those at the time denouncing novels found objectionable” (and thus Thorpe’s complaint that “[n]ovels are all so full of nonsense and stuff” comes across as bad-faith criticism).