Northanger Abbey, chapter 10: Marriage (as a metaphor) Is What Brings Us Together Today

Credit to Casandra Chouinard

Another night in Bath means another night out for Catherine. The first one covered in this chapter (yep, we’re speeding up the schedule) finds everyone at the theater. Isabella is her normal chatterbox self, teasing Cat about making “some droll remark” about Isabella’s preference for the country and declaring her intention to ignore James for the sake of Cat. Cat staunchly protests that she never would have made an impertinent remark, but Isabella either doesn’t believe her or doesn’t care. (Shapard says this is a sign of her lack of genteel manners, as openly speculating about someone’s dating life was extremely rude.) Then she talks all night long to him while ignoring her best friend.

She’s such a joy to be with.

The next morning, Cat is subjected to the same dynamic of being the third wheel tagging along with James and Isabella. They’re literally whispering and giggling with each other, which Cat doesn’t clock as signs of flirtations but merely views as impediments to her ability to enjoy being in their company. Happily, Miss Tilney arrives and they continue to get to know each other through mundane, ordinary conversation, “the merit of [which] being spoken with simplicity and truth, and without personal conceit, might be something uncommon.” Cat’s direct yet innocent comments about Henry makes it clear to his sister that she’s more than a little taken with him. Miss Tilney promises Cat that both she and Henry will appear at the next ball, which sends Cat giddily obsessing about what outfit to wear for at least 10 minutes (despite her great-aunt’s lecture about the perils of this “frivolous distinction”). Udolpho who now?

So here we go. This is what y’all came for. The Metaphor To End All Metaphors. And you know what I love about it most? John Thorpe is the catalyst that sets it off.

Let’s set the scene: Cat arrives, the Thorpe siblings take it for granted that she’s going to dance with John, she keeps telling herself that there’s no way she could expect Henry to ask her to dance yet again—but miraculously, he does. Just before the dance begins, John rudely insists that he had already asked Cat (he had not) and that he was just about to ask her again when she disappeared on him. He’s chased off by a line of dancing ladies (I mean, sort of? Enjoy the image, anyway) and Henry admits he finds John’s behavior annoying. To him, dancing is a “contract” or “an emblem of marriage,” “and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbors.”

At first, Cat can only see the differences between the two: namely, that dancing with someone only means spending 30 minutes in their company and that marriage is for life. Henry points out that in both, “man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal.” The main difference according to him is that in marriage, the husband supports the wife and the wife’s main duty is to be charming, while in dancing, these roles are switched. I found this observation to be interesting in the context of Austen’s cynical depictions of married couples. I don’t know how many of them hit this particular mark. Can you even imagine how the courtship of the Palmers went? (Although, by this metric, John Thorpe would be a disaster of a husband, which checks out with everything else we’ve seen.)

How Cat isn’t blushing up a storm as her new crush is talking about marriage is beyond me.

While Henry leads Cat through his long, graceful arcs of logic, Cat does what she does best: tells the truth without realizing it. She reveals that her acquaintance with John Thorpe is at best an obligation, that she’s not interested in anybody else, and that town life is more fun than country life. It’s easier for her to be entertained in Bath, where she “see[s] a variety of people in every street,” than in her country village, where she “can only go and call on Mrs. Allen” and I think that says a whole lot about why Cat is the way she is. “What a picture of intellectual poverty!” Henry exclaims, and I don’t think he’s being entirely sarcastic.

Toward the end of the dance, Cat sees General Tilney for the first time, which fills me with a sense of dread. Later, she and the Tilney siblings agree to go out for a walk tomorrow provided it doesn’t rain, which fills me with a rather more urgent sense of terror. John and Isabella haven’t ruined anything in over a day. Will the streak continue?

The Shapard Shelf: The characters attend a cotillion ball, named after “a dance imported from France” (it’s a type of square dance). Shapard describes Catherine’s plain-spokenness as resulting from “her persistent matter-of-fact perspective.” Likewise, her “willingness to admit” that she is “in pursuit of amusement” whether at home or on a trip “marks her honesty.” I think these are good examples of why  someone as wordy and witty as Henry would find Cat disarming.