Northanger Abbey, chapter 8: A Dance With Draggin'

We’re at another ball! Catherine looks forward to hanging out with Isabella, but that quickly falls apart. When John goes AWOL just before the first dance, Isabella decides to sit with Catherine in solidarity. Three minutes later, citing James’s impatience as an excuse, Isabella leaves the gym benches to go dance with James. I. Am So. Annoyed at all three of them! John for dipping, Isabella for acting like a hypocrite, and James for not caring that his sister is being stood up. How odd, Catherine muses, that Isabella would say one thing, yet turn around and do the opposite …

The narrator sums up Catherine’s disappointment: “To be disgraced in the eye of the world … while her heart is all purity … and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine’s life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character.”

But hark! A Henry Tilney sighting! Catherine’s assumption that the young woman on his arm is a younger sister saves her from “falling in a fit,” as behooves most heroines. Even better, Henry stays with Mrs. Allen, Cat, and the Thorpes, treating them to his well-bred conversation. Best of all, he asks Cat to dance with him. Worst of all, ball etiquette dictates that she must turn down the offer. John saunters over to claim the dance, which is almost as exciting as watching moss on a log: as he talks about his interests, she learns the “useful lesson that to go previously engaged to a ball does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.” Still true!

One good thing does happen on the dance floor: Catherine gets to meet Eleanor Tilney, the younger sister. Catherine wants to get to know her, but the structure of the dance prevents her from speed-running through another friendship, and she’s forced to “[go] through the first rudiments of an acquaintance” instead. But we do learn that Eleanor is elegant, refined, friendly, and doesn’t seem to feel the need “to fix the attention of every man near her.” Ooooh—shots fired, Isabella.

When Catherine meets up with Isabella again, her insipid flirting with James results in Cat missing the opportunity to see Henry again. Mrs. Thorpe badgers Cat into complimenting her son while Mrs. Allen placidly ships Henry with Catherine (okay, one point for Mrs. Allen). This leads to a misunderstanding where Mrs. Thorpe mistakes Mrs. Allen’s praise for Henry as praise for John, and for once Mrs. Allen is quicker on the uptake. John comes back to badger Cat (he asks her to get jiggy with it I mean, “stand up and jig it together again”), but she employs the Rules of Etiquette to wriggle out of another dance with him. Isabella returns to her, all smiles, no thoughts, head empty.

Folks, we just saw the breadth of Isabella’s and John’s characters—first in a casual setting and then in a formal setting. Their behavior doesn’t change. In fact, their quirks are heightened to such a degree that Cat has already learned to dodge John’s advances. Will this lesson stick? Could anything about John tempt Catherine to spend time with him? Will he ever come between Catherine and Henry directly? 

Okay, maybe I’m leading the witness on that last one. 

The Shapard Shelf: The pair of dances John and Catherine share took “approximately half an hour” to complete. James’s insistence on dancing again with Isabella “would be more permissible” in a public ball such as this one, rather than a private ball (cf. Bingley skipping a set or two until he can dance with Jane again in the assembly at the beginning of P&P). Shapard vindicates my dislike of Isabella by interpreting her excessive use of “my dear” as an example of “her incessant efforts to profess deep affection for others.”