A Psychological Reading of Northanger Abbey

The originating anxiety is emptiness, not terror. Catherine is plain, cheerful, and better at rolling down hills than at the accomplishments a heroine is supposed to have collected by seventeen. Her family is large and healthy. No one locks her in a tower. The mind that has been told, by every book it loves, that a life becomes real when it becomes extreme, looks at Fullerton and finds nothing to quote. From fifteen to seventeen she reads, and she stores lines she expects to need later, the way a person stores a speech for a crisis that has not been scheduled. The quotations are not a vice. They are a rehearsal for a self that the village has not yet cast.

Bath is the first setting that might count. The Allens take her. Mrs Allen's attention runs to muslin more readily than to character, so Catherine enters the rooms with a chaperone who cannot read the people. The hunger is for a plot that would prove she has arrived. A mind in that state does not wait for evidence and then feel. It feels the plot first, and then sorts the room until someone fits the part.

Isabella Thorpe supplies the part in an afternoon. The friendship is immediate, exclusive, and full of the language of forever. Catherine, lonely in a city where she knows almost no one, receives the clasp as proof. Attachment theory would call the speed a warning. Austen does not need the term. She shows what the speed is for. Isabella is hunting a richer husband while she performs a sister. James Morland is engaged, and then discarded the moment Captain Tilney looks more useful. The letter from Oxford says the duplicity hurt more than the loss, because until the last she declared herself as attached as ever and laughed at his fears.

Catherine's grief, when the letter arrives at the abbey, is real and smaller than the script of a broken friendship would demand. Henry teases her with the feelings a deserted sister ought to have: a void nothing else can occupy, balls become abhorrent, society irksome. She thinks, and says no. She is hurt that she cannot still love Isabella. She is not as afflicted as one would have thought. The defence of instant intimacy was the feeling of having been chosen. Once the performance is named, the feeling does not survive at the size the performance required. That is the psychological fact the popular summary misses when it stops at the cabinet. Catherine can be wrong about a murder and still learn, in the same house, that a vow of sisterhood was a transaction.

John Thorpe's psychology is vanity that edits other people's money until his own consequence is safe. He is happy to be spoken to by a general. He is also, at that moment, pretty well resolved on marrying Catherine himself. With whomever he is connected, their fortune must be great, and as the intimacy grows, so does the fortune. He doubles what he chooses to think Mr Morland can give, invents a rich aunt, sinks half the children, and speaks of Catherine as the almost acknowledged future heiress of Fullerton, because the Allens are wealthy and childless and kind to her. Ten or fifteen thousand from her father would, in his telling, sit nicely beside Mr Allen's estate.

The General does not doubt him. Thorpe's interest, by a sister nearly connected to the family and by his own boasts about Catherine, seems voucher enough, and the visible facts agree: a childless couple, a guest treated with parental kindness. Already the General has seen a liking in his son's face. The welcome is a valuation. Lavish kitchens, a modernised house, pressure to admire what Mr Allen's small hot-house cannot match: the hospitality is real as spending, and it is not kindness. When the Morland match with Isabella fails, Thorpe hastens to contradict everything. The family is necessitous, numerous almost beyond example, not respected, aiming at a style their fortune cannot warrant. The Allens, he has learned, will not leave Fullerton to Catherine. The General needs no more. He sets out the next day. Status anxiety here is not a mood. It is a mind that cannot tolerate having been wrong in public about a sum.

The formal feature that carries the psychology is an interruption. In Chapter 5 the narrator stops the Bath plot to answer a sentence people use in company. It is only a novel. The young lady lays the book down with affected indifference, or with momentary shame. The narrator names Cecilia, Camilla, and Belinda, and then the claim that will not sit inside a warning against reading: only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the liveliest wit, in the best-chosen language. A volume of the Spectator, she adds, would be produced with pride, though its papers are often coarse, improbable, and about nobody now living.

A book that meant to cure Catherine of novels would not pause to defend them. The pause is the author's mind refusing the shame the culture attaches to the form. Catherine's error is not that she reads. It is that she uses one kind of plot, the Alpine atrocity, as a template for Gloucestershire, while the narrator insists that the novel as a form is already a serious account of human nature. The joke and the defence are the same structure. Fiction is not the danger. A single script, treated as the only way a life can be true, is.

Henry Tilney is not outside the mechanism. On the drive to the abbey he tells her what a heroine will find: a lamp nearly exhausted, a vaulted room, an old cabinet of ebony and gold, a secret spring, a roll of manuscript. He is teasing. The tease is also a script, delivered by the person whose judgment she is learning to trust. That night the furniture cooperates. A black cabinet matches the joke too closely to ignore. She works the locks, draws out a roll, and the candle dies. Morning shows a washing-bill. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats. Then letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and breeches-ball. The outer sheet is a farrier's line: to poultice a chestnut mare. She hides the papers before breakfast.

Shame does not retire the script. It rearms it. The embarrassment of having been gothic about laundry becomes a hunger to be right about something else before Henry smiles. The General avoids his late wife's favourite walk. Her portrait hangs in Eleanor's room, not in the drawing-room. An epitaph in the family pew ascribes every virtue to her and calls the husband inconsolable. Catherine, still craving a plot that would make the house mean what her books meant, decides he must have been, in some way, her destroyer. The defence against humiliation is a better theory. The theory is still a corpse.

Henry finds her in his mother's room. The apartment is cheerful and kept. He asks what she has been judging from. Remember the country and the age. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own sense of the probable, and your observation of what is passing around you. Could such atrocities stay hidden where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? She runs to her own room in tears of shame. The visions of romance, the next chapter says, were over. She was completely awakened. For half an hour she makes herself as miserable as possible, sure he must despise her. He pays her rather more attention than usual, and never alludes to the morning. She decides that in the midland counties of England a wife is protected by law and manners, that poison is not sold like rhubarb, and that the General, cleared of the grossly injurious suspicion, is still not perfectly amiable.

The shift is not the lecture. The lecture corrects the species of horror. The shift is the night she is turned out. The General returns from London at eleven, when Henry is away at Woodston. Eleanor, pale, brings the message she did not author: a chaise at seven, no servant, no hour left to Catherine's choice, no farewell from the man who had regretted leaving her for even an hour. Her purse will not cover seventy miles. Eleanor lends the money, and asks for one letter under cover to Alice, because she is only a nominal mistress of the house. Catherine lies awake in the room that once frightened her. The wind is high. She hears it without curiosity or terror. Her anxiety has foundation in fact. The Gothic dark has become boring, because the evil in the house is ordinary and sufficient.

Henry comes to Fullerton and explains what he can. The narrator will not pretend the explanation was tidy. She leaves it to the reader to judge how much a son could have learned from such a father, and how much must wait for a letter from James. Catherine, at any rate, heard enough to feel that in suspecting General Tilney of murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty. That sentence is the book's psychological verdict. The Gothic guess magnified the method. It did not magnify the man. A mind trained on corpses reached for a corpse. The man who priced her, and who could not bear the sum to be revised, was already equal to the dawn dismissal.

The ending does not dissolve that fact into a moral about imagination. Eleanor marries a viscount, and the narrator adds, because the rules of composition forbid a character unconnected with the fable, that he is the gentleman whose negligent servant left the washing-bills. The General learns he was scarcely more misled by Thorpe's first boast than by the later overthrow of it. The Morlands are not poor. Catherine will have three thousand pounds. The Fullerton estate can still be left as its owner chooses. He permits the marriage, in a page of empty professions. Henry and Catherine marry within a twelvemonth of first meeting, he at twenty-six and she at eighteen. The narrator is convinced that the unjust interference may even have helped them, by improving their knowledge of each other, and then asks the reader to settle whether the tendency of the work is to recommend parental tyranny, or to reward filial disobedience. The happiness is real. The question is left standing. A cruelty that paid for itself in a quicker attachment has not been renamed as care.

Readers still arrive in a new room with a script already chosen, and then feel betrayed when the room will not play it. A friendship that declares itself in a day can be loneliness taking the first offer of intensity. A welcome that scales with a rumoured sum is still a welcome, until the sum is corrected and the welcome ends before breakfast. The anxiety is not only money. It is the fear of having been foolish for wanting a plot, and the cheaper lesson, which the culture prefers, that the wanting was the whole mistake.

Austen will not grant that cheaper lesson. The washing-bill is embarrassing, and the embarrassment is not the meaning. People still use a vivid story, a locked room, a secret document, a too-perfect host, as proof, because an ordinary cruelty is harder to hold than a dramatic one. The chaise at seven is the harder object. It does not look like a novel. It looks like a schedule.

The book is also a comedy of 1798 about a fashion in fiction, written by a young woman in a rectory that read everything aloud and laughed. To treat Catherine only as a case of confirmation bias flattens the joke Henry is allowed to tell, and the joke the narrator tells at the reader's expense. Gothic novels are not diagnosed. Radcliffe is called charming. The Alps and Pyrenees are granted their horrors. The limit Catherine draws is local: the midland counties, English law, a neighbourhood of voluntary spies. A reading that exports her shame into a general distrust of fiction repeats the cant the narrator stopped the chapter to refuse.

Henry's lecture is not a neutral cure. He is the son of the man under discussion, and his appeal to English probability is also a class comfort: such things are not done among us. The novel answers him later, without calling him a liar. Marriage law, rank, and a son's dependence are the actual instruments, and they do not require poison. Isabella is not only a type of false attachment. She is a young woman with no fortune, playing the only game the rooms offer, and the book is harder on her than on the Captain who helps her break the engagement. The last question, parental tyranny or filial disobedience, is a dare to the reader. A psychological account that closes it, and calls the marriage a resolution, has stopped where Austen left the sentence open.