Northanger Abbey, chapter 12: Speak Now
After seeking out the Tilneys’ address from the Pump-room master, she sets out to pay a visit, avoiding crossing paths with “her beloved Isabella and her dear family.” (HAH.) A somewhat confused butler tells her that Eleanor just left—and a devastated Cat sees for herself Miss Tilney exiting the building with her father. Cat thinks Eleanor deliberately stood her up eye-for-an-eye style. But “remember[ing] her own ignorance,” Cat admits that she just doesn’t know “to what rigors of rudeness in return it might justly make her amenable.”
That evening, Cat is in better spirits when she goes to see a play. She figures the Tilneys won’t show up because “they were habituated to the finer performances of the London stage.” She imbued this snobbery from Isabella, who claimed that London plays render the quality of plays performed elsewhere “quite horrid.” But toward the end of the play, Henry and his father arrive at the theater, “recall[ing] her to anxiety and distress.” Worst of all, when Henry at last sees her, he just … nods! Coldly! It's devastating! Cat has only two options here: she could “show her resentment towards him” and refuse to speak (and toss in a bit of excessively flirting with others for flavor), or let “[f]eelings rather natural than heroic [possess] her” and seek to explain her actions at the first opportunity.
She’s a bad heroine, but a good egg.
Once she has Henry’s attention, she makes her apology/explanation before he says a word. She tries to get Mrs. Allen to confirm John Thorpe’s blatant fibbing, but more convincing is her cry of “I had ten thousand times rather have been with you” and assertion that “as soon as ever I saw you … I would have jumped out and run after you.” Henry warms up to Cat after this, because who wouldn’t? But Cat doesn’t believe that Eleanor isn’t mad at her, citing her earlier failed attempt to visit the Tilneys. Henry assures her that Eleanor very much hopes to make an excuse of her own for the faux pas and tactfully says that his father simply wanted to leave on their walk just as Cat paid her visit.
There’s one more thing bothering her, however: “But, Mr. Tilney, why were you less generous than your sister? … [Y]ou were angry.” He protests that it would be entitled of him to feel anger toward her. Cat is on the ball: “Nobody would have thought you had no right who saw your face.”
Nobody could appreciate a Catherine in such a way as a Henry could. He finds her so irresistible that he stays with her for the rest of the evening.
After the show, Henry and his father depart—but not before Catherine noticed General Tilney talking to John Thorpe of all people. (I mean, of all people!) John brags to Cat that he and the general bonded over a billiard game and that he has been bragging to the general about Cat being “the finest girl in Bath.” He then proceeds to awkwardly flirt with Cat “in spite of her entreating him to have done” until she’s safely on her way home. Let’s see if you can spot the ~Plot Point~ I just mentioned and remember when it comes up again in Volume 2!
In the meantime, Catherine and reader has more Henry to look forward to, and even if that comes with regular appearances from the worst fake love interest ever, it’s worth it.
The Shepard Shelf: Shapard weighs in on the events: “Catherine’s humiliating rebuff … represent[s] a just punishment in the ethical calculus of the novel” (a phrase that I will now steal because it’s just so good). In spite of Isabella’s snobby declaration about London shows always being better, “the Bath theater was [also] of high quality” and not something that the Tilneys would scorn for being mid-tier. Cat’s expressing to Henry that she wanted to “run round to the box in which he sat” to give her explanation, even though she restrained herself from doing so, would be “considered unladylike” though in a wider sense “Catherine’s disparities between word and action contrast with” Isabella’s much more glaring hypocrisy.
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