SOURCE: "The Lessons of Northanger Abbey," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, Fall, 1974, pp. 14-30.

In Northanger Abbey, as in a number of works of eighteenth-century fiction (say, Tom Jones), the protagonist and the reader undergo parallel, but in almost no way identical, educations. The reader, as Austen's irony announces in the first paragraph, is to be led toward something better than the conventional novels to which she alludes again and again in the course of the book. As to the protagonist, the first chapter offers a dry account of Catherine's progress in music and drawing; these early lessons are extended by Mrs Allen and Henry Tilney, who teach her how to choose muslins and compose picturesque scenes, and are also extended by Catherine herself, who learns first from books and then by testing experience through trial and error. All this is obvious enough. The connections between Catherine's education and ours, however, are less obvious: so are those between two modes in Catherine's own development, the social (Bath) and the literary (Northanger Abbey). Here, to some critics, the coherence of the novel seems to break down, an event to be explained from Austen's biography. She did, after all, move from literary satire in her earliest works toward psychological and moral issues in her mature fiction: Northanger Abbey, in between the two, seems to look both ways, and Janus Austen fails where young Jane or mature Jane succeeded. I do not think that this is a necessary hypothesis, and I should like to devote the rest of this article to proposing a more flattering one, in which the tables are turned. That is, I propose that the strength of Northanger Abbey, and its theme, emerge from the connections between Catherine's education and ours, and between the social and literary modes in her experience.

The connections are made peculiarly complex by Austen's granting Catherine an autonomy from the novel, of the sort that we readers naturally maintain. A look at the first chapter will suggest what I mean. There, a volley of innuendos about her future heroism makes one include under 'education' all Catherine's movements toward 'heroic' status, the freshening of her adolescent complexion as well as her growth in memorizing moral sentences. Much of Austen's irony at this point comes from her pretence that in real life, the life that her novel imitates, Catherine can 'learn to be a heroine,' a category not proper to real life at all, but only to the repertoire of fiction. Superficially, such irony looks like a special irony of Fielding's, the 'transformation of a spontaneous and impromptu action into one performed to accord with a formal pattern . . . [which] imposes on the unthinking or spontaneous actions and deductions of the characters a strong suggestion of deliberations and definite intention; the instinctive and intuitional become conscious and purposeful.' But in Fielding, such a transformation is a means of enlarging the scope of expectations within which we see the character. As his diction grows more formal, trivia try on epic armour for size and so are given their proper measure within the limits of action. No matter how trivial Catherine may or may not be, however, she cannot be given proper measure by trying on a heroine's furbelows, because the formal patterns that stand behind her spontaneous actions have no set value. Dignity, in Fielding, is at least a provisional norm; novelistic heroism in the first chapter of Northanger Abbey is not. As we see Catherine passing from infancy to mid-adolescence, we see the firm fact of her normality measuring the truth to nature of the sort of fiction which trades in heroines. The method of Fielding has been stood on its head so decisively that Catherine, in her nondescript childhood, becomes the main witness of Austen's own imitative truth to nature. In Northanger Abbey, then, the characters are declared to be logically prior to the fiction, and therefore ideally autonomous of it. Fielding establishes the world for Tom Jones; Catherine, as an index of normality, establishes the world for Austen, and thus exceeds the fiction in which she appears. At the same time, obviously, the novel contains Catherine and offers us a way of dealing with her experience—according to the laws of fiction—which she cannot know.

We can see this play between control and independence still more openly in Austen's treatment of Eleanor's marriage, 'an event,' the narrator says, 'which I expect to give general satisfaction among all her acquaintance. My own joy on the occasion is very sincere.' Here the mocbiographer's pose amuses us, especially because the marriage seems to have been brewed up all of a sudden to get the plot together, and the narrator to be rejoicing not for Eleanor but for her own last-minute ingenuity. As the passage goes on, however, she checks our amusement by continuing the pose to say something for which we no longer feel irony appropriate: 'I know no one more entitled, by unpretending merit, or better prepared by habitual suffering, to receive and enjoy felicity.' This is not funny. The narrator seems to be taking the independence of Eleanor seriously, rather in the manner of a biographer, who knows that for him character and form are independent as well as interdependent. Is the 'tell-tale compression of the pages' by which the reader forsees a quick and happy dénouement, for example, the comment of a biographer or of a contriver of fiction? For both kinds of author, after all, the compression of pages is tell-tale, although the source of control over length differs.

Similarly, when Catherine comes back to her home in Fullerton, Austen repeats the tone of heavy irony about heroines and heroism with which Catherine was introduced to us at the beginning of the book, also in Fullerton: Ά heroine in a hack post-chaise, is such a blow upon sentiment, as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can withstand.' Nothing, at first glance, seems less appropriate than this tone. The irony does not, as in the first chapter, preclude tragedy or sympathy: twenty-eight chapters of Northanger Abbey have cured us of looking for tragedy and left us incurable as to sympathy for Catherine. Nor does she now fancy herself a prospective heroine; for the first time, she does not. Yet it is no accident that this renewal of irony comes just after the point that corresponds to the anagnorisis and peripeteia of an Aristotelian plot, when her expulsion from the Abbey has informed her what the spirit of Gothic violence might really mean, and has set in motion for her a redefinition of the Abbey, of Bath society (as typified by John and Isabella Thorpe, whose casual slander and golddigging glamour respectively refer straight to the General's motives), and eventually of Fullerton itself, whose adequacy Catherine is to find she has outgrown. It is at this point in the book that she can be least scathed by Austen's irony, and therefore when Austen finds it safest to reassert her authorial context of order, correlative with Catherine's. I will turn to Austen's context, which is connected with our education, and Catherine's, which is concerned with her own, quite shortly.

First, however, I might note that the autonomy of the characters is not merely a logical inference. It is intended and purposive. It sets this novel apart from the formulatic novels being satirized, novels that pretend to let one look directly at the lives of the characters without an author's intrusions, but which in fact impose a crude and familiar pattern on those lives. Austen lays claim to more frankness and less imposing of patterns. Another purpose of the autonomy enjoyed by the characters is to make quite clear a parallel between Catherine and us. She, with her free and unconstrained will, is trying to 'read' events, using inferences from her experience (including that from novels); we are doing the same thing, except that the events we are 'reading' are those within a novel. Finally, the autonomy of the characters, and therefore their freedom, is important in a novel which puts stress on education, a matter of choice within a context of established possibilities. The co-ordinates of values and prediction that operate here refer directly to a freedom of assessment and to an ability to erect at least provisory laws, in short to a balance between the claims of 'liberty' and 'necessity' (as Hume called them). The Mysteries of Udolpho, with its formulae, concentrates on necessity, the impositions of the unchosen on individuals; the narrator's voice in Northanger Abbey supplies that dimension, but Austen must, and does, balance it with the other dimension, that of liberty, to enable education to go on. She makes the form of the book, unlike that of Emma or Persuasion, independent of the heroine's mind or perceptiveness, and the heroine ingenuous and unfledged enough, unlike Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot, not to cloud with her own personality the world she must interpret. This reduction of personality makes it possible for Austen to keep our attention on Catherine's freedom and also to bring protagonist and reader into line with each other. To Austen, after all, her 'reader' is also a creature of reduced personality, a mere common denominator of real people, marked by a good heart, a moderate knowledge of the world, and a certain alertness.

As to Catherine's 'context of order,' as I have called it, it is designed to be, and is in fact, simply the sum of her experience as recorded in Northanger Abbey. Austen's, which is also made ours, has an additional depth, from literary convention. I can illustrate the effect of this difference most easily with an example. Near the end of chapter 1 comes a list of choice phrases from 'works [that] heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventual lives.' At first, Austen seems only to be making fun of sententiousness, or perhaps of pulling such moral blossoms from their proper gardens in Pope, Gray, Thomson, and Shakespeare. A closer look suggests that she has a positive point: so as to make the blossoms grow in new soil, they have to be part of a new garden. Catherine's literary snippets do respond in some degree to the forthcoming vicissitudes of her 'heroism.' The subjects of the six quotations are every one of them to be a major theme in Catherine's life, for they include (in order) social unkindness, obscured merit, education, passionate deductions from trifles, equality of suffering regardless of rank, and the pain of thwarted love. If the quotations do not soothe Catherine, they at least serve her. They offer her a matrix for her experience, and incidentally, they rebuke by anticipation the sort of literal-mindedness that Catherine is later to exhibit in applying literature—Gothic formulas—to life. None of the quotations, as stated, actually works out in her adventures. She does not bear about the mockery of woe, suffer jealousy, sit like Patience on a monument, get trodden on like a beetle, or waste her sweetness on the air of Fullerton; nor does she meet anyone who does any of these. 'The young idea' is taught 'how to shoot,' but not (as in Catherine's source, Thomson's Spring) by parents, all of whom—the Morlands, the Aliens by proxy, Mrs. Thorpe, and General Tilney—make pedagogues at best mediocre. What the quotations do, then, is to point to modes of experience cognate or complementary to Catherine's. She must translate these modes into her own idiom and make them existentially viable, if only by rejecting them for alternative responses in dealing with her public, personal, and inner lives.

She cannot, of course, do this. Once she loses the context—her destiny as a heroine—which is her principle of economy and selection for these quotations, the quotations themselves seem pointless for her. For us, however, the novel itself provides the principle of selection. Whereas for Catherine heroism and her real life are disjunct, we see them as parts of a single continuous mode of experience, a novel, within which whatever the novelist selects maintains a purpose. In addition, we can transfer the meaning of the quotations because Austen has shown us how to do it. This same first chapter, after identifying Catherine with the natural, has already converted the child of nature into something very much like a child of the novelist's art. The thin sallow tomboy, that is, has grown steadily prettier. The little girl has traded her insensibility for the shallow sensitivity of the adolescent, which for a heroine is the right direction. This process hints to us that Austen's irony will not turn out to be so exclusive as one might have thought at the start of the chapter. The seemingly excluded elements, without their conventional plumage, can reappear in the perspective her irony creates, to do their jobs under new working conditions. Without this hint to improve upon, and without the fact and form of the novel to offer pattern to her, Catherine's reality remains only the immediate linear sequence of her young life. She cannot be, like us the readers, objective and systematic. When her sense of her heroism ebbs, her collection of literary snippets has no meaning qua collection for her, but for us it is an artistic grouping contrived by Jane Austen, and thus has a meaning beyond any that the most profound and alert heroine, living within the novel, could find in it.

Another, more important, intermeshing of the social and literary themes in Northanger Abbey, as seen through the independent perspectives of Catherine and the reader, comes in chapter 14. Here Henry Tilney confesses quite honestly that he enjoys the tear-stained maidens and saturnine Italians of Mrs Radcliffe. From such a paragon of ironists, a confession like this is not to be taken lightly, and we are appropriately grateful for plain evidence of Henry's humanity. None the less, we must look at his commendation in context. The discussion about Mrs Radcliffe is parenthetized by Catherine's being twitted for misuse of words ('amazingly,' 'nice'). There follows an exchange about history, which Eleanor says she likes both for its truth and for its fiction (its dramatic embellishments of the attested facts); then an exchange about education, promptly illustrated by Catherine's being taught informally about the picturesque; and lastly a contretemps in which Eleanor takes Catherine's intimation about 'something dreadful' to come out in London as prophetic of a riot instead of a Gothic thriller.

Ignoring the separate benefits of all these discussions for Catherine, one can see that the subjects discussed are really an analysis of the Gothic novel into components: words, pleasure for readers, history, didacticism, picturesque scenery, and the violence of life which it professes to imitate. Austen makes clear that these are in fact Gothic elements. The words that Catherine abuses appear in her discussion of Udolpho, and the 'something dreadful' turns out to be a novel. Picturesque scenery comes up because the 'beautiful verdure and hanging coppice' of Beechen Cliff remind Catherine of the French scenery in Udolpho. Historians are compared with novelists here, and elsewhere the age of Blaize Castle ("The oldest in the kingdom,' John Thorpe assures her) and Northanger Abbey clearly connects the past and the Gothic novel. As to novelistic didacticism, or what one can and cannot learn from novels, that is so obvious a theme in this book, and so obvious a concern of writers like Mrs Radcliffe, that I need not press the point.

In chapter 14, then, Austen fans out these components of the Gothic novel, so that each is exposed against a norm of some sort. The discussion moves in steady sequence from the more abstract to the more immediate, from the proper use of affective words to the proper horror at the mobs of Gordon or Robespierre, or, as I think more historically likely, of the United Irish Society. In between, on either side of the talk about education, lie the use of fictional art to dress raw annals, and, as its more substantial counterpart, the use of picturesque art to organize one's view of raw nature. We seem to have the full range of novelistic pretensions tested against norms, and to discover that on every ground but that of giving pleasure, the novels fail at doing what they should. Their indiscriminate emotionalism leads to a collapse of verbal and moral precision. Their historical and scenic folderol teaches one neither to understand nor to see. Henry's commendations are given the limits that he himself only half bothers to voice: the context asserts the dulce, but hardly the utile of fiction. The only crucial element in novels which chapter 14 does not mention, and thereby spares, is the least 'literary' of all; I mean the mimetic. Austen has suggested earlier, in chapter 5, that this is the genuinely useful part of fiction, which clarifies the dispositions of character and social intelligence in actual life. She has exemplified her point through the whole of her original volume 1 (chapters 1-15) during which the overtly 'literary'—the source of Catherine's illusions and Isabella Thorpe's poses—has been opposed to the real world, plain language, and calm analysis.

The second half of the novel, however, is to reintegrate the real world and that of literary convention through the central symbol (and titular 'character') of the novel, Northanger Abbey itself. Therefore, just as Catherine's group of literary clichés in chapter 1 turns out to provide a sort of thematic index for her later adventures, so the grouping of chapter 14 provides an index to the Abbey, in which her novelistic and social interests coincide. Words and violence, history and scenery, and education come together in two levels at Northanger Abbey. We have appearances: rhetorical gallantry from a military man, taking place in a building that blends medieval grandeur with modern comfort, set among 'knolls of old trees, or luxuriant plantations, and . . . steep woody hills rising behind to give it shelter.' Appearances have their seamy side in the duplicity of the General's words and the brutality of his conduct, and in the subjugation of history and scenery alike to his greed for mercenary succession in the family and for show. These two treatments of the grouping in chapter 14, each modifying but not denying the other, are Austen's complex alternative to the stock components of the novel. In our—and Catherine's;—movement between these two complementary treatments is the education in 'reading' that stands at the midpoint of the grouping in chapter 14, where 'to torment' and 'to instruct' may become synonyms. The process of learning through pain makes Catherine's and Henry's exercise in subjective lexicography end up a good bit truer than either could realize.

Another kind of revision that we can perform, and Catherine cannot, carries predictive weight within the story. I am thinking of the translation of the Radcliffean dramatis personae into the idiom of Northanger Abbey. If we consider the sequence of Mrs Allen, the younger Thorpes, and General Tilney, we find that we have pastiches of the Gothic novel's watchful chaperone, confidante, unwelcome suitor, and titled villain. But they are not pastiches of the same sort. Mrs Allen is the null version of the chaperone. Isabella is a genuine but corrupt confidante, and her brother a shrunken but certainly genuine unwelcome suitor. The General, finally, is a reasonable facsimile, within a social world, of a Montoni or Schedoni. The sequence moves from burlesque to imitation (in the eighteenth-century sense) of the Gothic, setting up complementary ways of using Gothic fiction within the new idiom of Northanger Abbey. By the time Catherine spends her last wakeful night in the darkness of the Abbey, the Gothic mode has been emptied through the transfer of its energies into her experience and ours. For Catherine, this is psychologically and finally true. For us, as we are sympathetic with her, it is aesthetically true: we at once see the General as the point of convergence where the evil of a Radcliffe villain can meet everyday life, and also as the point of divergence where everyday life fades off into the silliness of dark keeps and darker plots. If we define the General's power of villainy by his character as a Montoni, we cannot forget that sensible people find Montoni a cardboard barbarian. The General may also be more menacing because he is less absurdly parodic, 'realer,' than the other Gothic pastiches; but he shares with Mrs Allen and the Thorpes a literary allusiveness that is predictive. His acts are limited by our knowledge of their Gothic ancestry, and his villainy lives within a world whose claim to be final and tragic has been disputed by the smiling irony of the narrator from the first paragraph on.

Austen reinforces our sense of sequence among these characters—Mrs Allen, the young Thorpes, General Tilney—by making them progressive examples of a single theme, that of egoism, which is particularly appropriate to the self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence that Gothic novels nourish. She starts with Mrs Allen's costume, an external embellishment for a woman barren of both mind and children, a woman for whom dressing takes the place of beauty and social graces. Here the tone is light, the vice fixed on transiency (fashion, individual appearances at discrete events) and therefore without effect. The Thorpes advance this one notch. The egoism of John Thorpe has as its concrete symbol a horse and carriage, which suggests a mobility and continuity denied Mrs Allen. His main interest, in getting someplace, shows itself through gossip and anecdote and fantasy, all shoddy forms of historical sequence. And like his sister, he dispossesses objective time for the profit of personal time, connected with the speed of his horses, as Isabella's is connected with duration and punctuality in romantic or social engagements. Isabella is her brother's counterpart too in her claim of permanence, through fictions of Mrs Radcliffe's or her own, for her flux of actions. For her and John fiction and autobiography are identical. Her concrete symbol, the Gothic novel, and John's, his equipage, join in the abortive trip to Blaize Castle, that sham of the 1760s which John declares the oldest castle in the kingdom. When we pass to the General, and Gothic interest shifts from Blaize Castle to Northanger Abbey, we shift from the false history that the Thorpes represent to the real history of the General. His material version of the Thorpes' fantasy life, centring upon familial past and succession, has a real expression in property. The temporal and spatial extension of General Tilney, his ownership of the world, is greater than the Thorpes', and the Thorpes' than Mrs Allen's, just as is true of the share of reality granted each as a Gothic pastiche. The General's zeal for punctual attendance to his wishes follows from the Thorpes' use of personal time, completing the series of progressive analogies.

Austen dwells upon these thematic analogies to the extent that her characters share traits they need not have, like imprudence (would a real General Tilney be taken in by an obvious upstart like John Thorpe?), inability to put themselves in the place of others, and a disregard for truth. These characteristics are plausible enough, but one can think of unpleasant egoists—Blifil, for instance, or Mr Murdstone—who do not fit this mould. In Northanger Abbey, we get a continuity of temperament from one to the other so as to keep the analogies on the surface. We also get a continuity in the narrative. Mrs Allen introduces Catherine to the Thorpes, in a scene that not only broaches the theme of false history, in Mrs Thorpe's interminable reports of her familial past and present, but also implies some equivalence between Mrs Allen's and Mrs Thorpe's obsessions. The young Thorpes, whose mother imparts to them her garrulous self-centredness and her abilities as a historian, take over the middle of the novel, counterposed by their antitheses, Henry and Eleanor Tilney. From this opposition emerge the last two characters we meet, General and Captain Tilney, who are at least half Thorpean, certainly more than half in their sense of ethics. Therefore, one of our first glimpses of each of these men is in connection with a Thorpe—John and General appear, for a task of pretence, at a play; the Captain and Isabella in the superficial concord of a dance—and the two liaisons thus formed determine the action of the rest of the novel through Catherine's leaving the Abbey.

Such continuity in the thematic action lends strength to our predictions. We can, for instance, limit our fears of what each malefactor may do, simply because each acts under the largely discredited aegis of his predecessor. In Bath, a lie from John Thorpe succeeds in snatching Catherine from the amiable Tilneys, in a parody of the stock abduction scene: she cries out for him to stop while he laughs, smacks his whip, encourages his horse, makes odd noises, and drives on. When the same man's lie leads to her being snatched from the same amiable company at Northanger Abbey, the pattern reaffirms itself to the discredit of the General, who has been its agent. We do not know at the time of Catherine's exodus why she is being cast out, so that our scorn is largely retrospective; but in between the two events, the narrator mockingly remarks of the General's eldest son, Captain Tilney, that his admiration of Catherine 'was not of a very dangerous kind. . . . He cannot be the instigator of the three villains in horsemen's great coats, by whom she will hereafter be forced into a travelling-chaise and four, which will drive off with incredible speed.' Thorpe's parodic action, followed some chapters later by the narrator's irony about the same kind of action, can hardly help bringing our sense of pattern and our literary consciousness to bear upon the General's brutality, cutting it down to size. Similarly, pattern limits one interpretation of the General's puzzling courtliness to Catherine, that he himself has amorous designs on the heroine after the fashion of Manfred in The Castle of Otranto or the Marquis of Montait in Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. John Thorpe has been such an idiotic suitor that his example keeps the potential menace of General Tilney leashed; and Austen reinforces the pattern by showing us the triviality, and benefits, of Captain Tilney's faithlessness to Isabella, which Catherine learns of in the chapter before the General displays his faithlessness to her.

If one asks why Austen had to supply such close narrative continuity to get this sort of analogical effect, the answer may lie in her equivocal treatment of the genre 'novel.' In Northanger Abbey, the normative schemes of the genre meet with such irony that they must be lent a provisional validity by the procedure of the plot, which is our immediate reading experience. Austen lends them validity too by making us feel the degree to which she, as author, is in conscious control. For example, in the first half of the book, she offers us a symmetry of characters. Three girls visit Bath, one a false friend of Catherine's, one a true. Each has a brother who courts Catherine, and Catherine and Eleanor have a brother who courts Isabella. Both Catherine's friends have widowed parents, an indulgent mother for Isabella and a tyrannic father for Eleanor. Each Morland child is the companion of one, and the victim of the other, Thorpe child. When this sort of symmetry has been exploited, and Catherine leaves Bath for Northanger, Austen turns to a different sort of patterning, a balance of chapters. The novel as a whole has one chapter each of introduction and conclusion which bracket fifteen chapters in Bath and fourteen after Bath, the breaking point here being Eleanor's invitation to Northanger Abbey. Three chapters (17-19) pass between that invitation and the actual departure from Bath, three between Eleanor's declaration that Catherine must leave the Abbey (28) and the chapter of conclusion. The intervening period of visit has as its midpoint the imbroglio about the General's treatment of his wife (23-4); which, with its Gothic and social elements, acts as a transition between the three chapters (20-2) in which historical reality chastizes Catherine's conventional Gothicism, and those three (25-7) in which reality chastizes her romantic friendship with Isabella. The reader can hardly muster up surprise when he learns that Austen has placed the Abbey on so direct a line with Fullerton and Bath that Catherine's journey home is almost a physical repetition of her journey to the Tilneys.

In what she does for us, Austen is partially reminiscent, once again, of Fielding, the Fielding of Tom Jones. He too helps the reader with thematic analogies, uses formal pattern to assure one of his control, and flaunts a well-developed self-awareness of his own job as novelist, so that we in turn become aware of ours as readers. She differs from him, though—and I mention him largely as the greatest and most obviously congenial predecessor of Northanger Abbey—in two important ways, her use of allusion (the Gothic pastiches) to offer valid a priori predictive patterns to us, and her refusal ever to deceive us as our fairweather friend, the narrator of Tom Jones, so often does. A strong measure of a priorism is not surprising from someone writing when Austen did, nor is the fact that with the Gothic pastiches, as with Catherine's quotations and the conventions of the formulaic novel, we are dealing with the redemption of groups or structures by transplanting them, not simply with categorizing or assimilating individual phenomena. Austen's method thus is quite different from the burlesque of her juvenilia or the typical use of allusion for praise or blame. Her refusal to deceive us as Fielding does, makes our job easier but forfeits a measure of sympathetic understanding between her reader and her heroine; never forced to realize that we share Catherine's incapacities, we can remain rather olympian. As a result, one is inclined to see the book as a rational exploration of a certain kind of problem, the way in which reading a work of fiction differs from 'reading' real life, with the formulaic novel of Mrs Radcliffe and the redemptive novel of Jane Austen as two cases in point.

If in fact that is the problem set by Northanger Abbey, let us turn to Catherine, unprotected and naïve, to see what her methods of 'reading' are. She has no narrative continuity or balance of chapters to help her, but conceivably her novelistic reading might lead her to see analogies and Gothic pastiches, and thus to be offered clues of some necessarily vague sort. Catherine, however, only reads in sensu litterali. When her Gothic fears about the cabinet and the General prove false, she gives up on them, instead of trying to see how they might apply to the perceivable realities of life at the Abbey. In that idiom the General is, as we have said, Austen's Montoni—an avaricious warrior with an eye for a young lady's inheritance—and the laundry list in the cabinet, as we learn by the end of the novel, is the social memoirs of a wretched captive. Here is the cue for the conscious tear: the mute voice of a young lover who stayed in the same room as Catherine, suffered from the same relative poverty as Catherine, and met with a contempt that anticipates her fate, just as his being freed for money and marriage anticipates (and effects) her fate. The narrator pretends to introduce this last point only as a means of doing her own laundry, tidying her novel, but as we have seen, that pose of hers does not deny the autonomy of her characters.

Catherine simply underreads, not overreads, in the Abbey. Once 'the visions of romance were over,' she still lacks common sense, which in this novel has no limits except those inextricable from human frailty: common sense knows that if fiction exists, and if people eagerly read it, there must be something to what it says. A kind of clue to this is offered Catherine by that model of common sense, Henry Tilney. He remonstrates with her, for her suspicions of his father, in one of those periods that make even amateur Jane-ites gasp: 'Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?' These spies and this sinister 'laying open' are inversions of Gothic secrecy which are quite equivalent to it in restrictiveness. The power of inversion is to be shown in the General's anti-Gothic crime, that of posting the heroine to the bosom of her family on a Sabbath in spring—admittedly under conditions that make the General almost criminal indeed. But understandably, a Catherine lost in her shame cannot pick up Henry's nuance of tone. If she were a subtle enough reader to have done so at any time, she would not have had to be lectured in the first place.

Social forms, then, are the only a priori patterns which Catherine can use as a guide. To some extent, within the social classes among which she moves, they are a passable guide, but more for us than for her. We know that the economy of a novel tends to exclude the unique discontinuities of behaviour that mark our own lives, the results of a morning's dyspepsia or an afternoon's look at the state of the stock market. Novelistic acts are likely to be emblematic acts, expressions of a character's ethos within social norms. In real life, where such economy is rarer, one must test the degree to which acts are emblematic. The tool is empathy, intuiting someone else's dispositions and loci of action. Although a debased form of empathy is the art that the Gothic novel most demands, Catherine has never learned it. As Henry Tilney tells her: 'With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced? What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person's feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered?—but, how should I be influenced, what would be my inducement in acting so and so?' We have talked about a lack of empathy in our sequence of egoists, about Mrs Allen's assuming universal concern with her pelisse, or Thorpe's bragging about his bibulous nights to a shocked country girl. In terms of values, Catherine's egoism is far more benign than theirs, since it rides on the crupper of her guilelessness and good nature. In terms of prediction, however, it is deadly. Even if it were not, Austen's problems of prediction are such as can baffle the exemplary Tilneys, who misconstrue Catherine's riding off with Thorpe when she was to walk with them. They take her association with the Thorpes as a token of one thing, we of another; and this is a matter of empathy. But even we are as badly fooled as is Catherine when Eleanor asks her to visit the Abbey 'in an embarrassed manner.' What we put down to modesty really comes from the moral humiliation of having to perform a friendly act to a friend hypocritically, at parental command. Both motives, within the same set of social norms, would fit Eleanor's character; we work by probabilities and are wrong. In this 'novel of manners,' manners express character and ethical values, but completely so only in retrospect, only in the shape of history or art, not life.

All Catherine's education can do for her, then, is to lead her to realize how various situations might turn out, to see the alternatives to her own way of putting things together. Such a realization about ambiguities and the need for at once thinking like oneself and like others is the groundwork for irony. I do not mean an irony for the sake of detachment, except insofar as judgment needs disinterest, but for the sake of keeping open the complementary perspectives on the judgments one has made. That sort of irony is the goal, within the story as related, of Catherine's education. Her marriage to its finest exponent, Henry Tilney, marks not so much her leap to reason and wisdom—no one in a sensible book is wise at eighteen, if indeed at all—as her being united to a source of ironic vision, and thus becoming genuinely educable. Catherine's Bildung, we may suppose, shifts into high gear only after Northanger Abbey ends.

What the narrator's voice does in the form of the novel, then, Henry Tilney does in the narrative. Their irony sets forth the middle road between personal freedom and constraint. Personal freedom as an absolute ideal marks the wilful hypocrisy of the General and the Thorpes, whose worlds are fictions of their own contriving. Constraint marks the Gothic novel, in which fate and chance make all acts of will tentative. Henry and the narrator treat personal power or impotence, learning and fallibility, as part of a universal plan involving those Humean categories, liberty and necessity. Both can accept the valid shaping function, and also the limits, of personal fictions. The sign of their acceptance is their flexibility. Henry's first meeting with Catherine is an exercise in ironic pretence that echoes the narrator's pretence, he in terms of social form as she of novelistic form. Henry starts with the role of the Dutiful Partner, shaping 'his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice . . . with a simpering air.' He next thrusts upon Catherine the role of the Dutifully Journalizing Ingenue. And then, with a straight face, he communes with Mrs Allen about muslins, entering into an impromptu reduction of reality, with improvised rules, instead of the stock reductions of a moment before. Henry's behaviour roughly approximates the narrator's taking the role of the Authoress in chapter 1, thrusting upon Catherine that of the Heroine, and then entering into the characters' own versions of reality with an irony suddenly more covert. One of the crucial functions of the first three chapters is to use a transference of what the philosophers call 'dispositional' values, from the novelistic to the social idiom, so as to make Henry the narrator's viceroy. With this level of control now established within the narrative, Austen can introduce Catherine to its parodies, the Thorpes and the Gothic, in chapters 4 through 7. Henry's pliability and comprehensiveness are norms by which one tests their rigidity of disposition.

The narrator's viceregal use of Henry does not keep her from intervening too. It is easy to see why. Henry's irony tries to place within his world the characters and events that emerge within his field of experience. The narrator's irony tries to place within her world, the novel, the characters and events that she has endowed with their own life. To a large extent, these worlds and their populations coincide so that Henry can be a kind of spokesman for the narrator, and share in directing the energies of good sense. None the less, one of the themes of Northanger Abbey is precisely that the described world is different from the description of that world, in that the one is free and the other is fixed. Henry is to Catherine as the narrator is to us. To have a character take over the narrator's voice, therefore, would destroy a major interest of the book, by conflating its analogous but competing idioms. For this reason the narrator must continue to intervene. Perhaps one might add as a principle that the narrator ought to use a range of tones and techniques as great as she can, just so long as she does not distract the reader. The greater her formal virtuosity, the more energy she pumps into the organization of her novel, the more the aesthetic perspectives of Northanger Abbey can compete for our attention with the story being told. One of the virtues of this book is its controlled restlessness of narrative modes. Conversely, once Henry Tilney has proved his flexibility of response, he need show no range of ironic (or narrative) techniques. He must give validity to his irony by showing its relative adequacy to the situations around him; and so the situations around him grow increasingly complex and demanding, to test Henry's attitudes in this way. The narrative voice, then, is capable of change but not development; Austen's characters, including Henry, are quite capable of development but only rarely and surprisingly of change.

As I disagree with those critics who charge inconsistencies in tone between the 'Gothic' and sociological parts of the novel, I disagree with those who charge inconsistencies in viewpoint. Austen chose in Northanger Abbey, for elaborate and well-defined aesthetic reasons, to adopt a mode common in her predecessors. 'Inconsistencies' mark Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy too, if one takes the speaking voice behind the novel as that of a character rather than that of a rhetor. Unlike Henry Tilney, the narrator is not viewing events but relating them. Hence her concern about her function as novelist. The points of view that she may adopt, moment by moment, in helping the reader grasp the subject matter may very well be continuous with the points of view represented by the different characters. Her decision to say what one of her characters might have said, given his ethos, may be captious or uneconomical—though in Northanger Abbey, when the rhetorical demands of specific cases are considered, it almost never is—but such a decision cannot create inconsistency in method with her letting the characters speak for themselves on other occasions. Similarly, Henry Tilney may, without being inconsistent, imitate a stock character on one occasion, and, on another, speak in his own ironic voice. In short, shifting rhetorical techniques do not entail shifts in character because they do not entail character at all. At this level of abstraction, the narrator and Henry are interchangeable. But only the narrator remains at this level of abstraction.

Henry has a character of his own, then, which Austen must keep distinct from her narrator's personality. He is fallible, so as to show us the profits and pitfalls of someone's doing in real life what we keep doing as readers, solving difficulties and making predictions by using a priori structures. Although his intelligence makes us believe in his independence, he is deeply bound up in the action of the novel. At each step in the second half of the novel, someone hedges him into embarrassment: first his brother, then his father, and finally his fiancée-elect. Our sight of him at Fullerton, numb, dumb, and blushing, sets him as far apart from the narrator as does the act of moral courage that has brought him there, for blushes and bravery (unlike shifting rhetoric) do refer to character. Weakness and strength both proceed from commitment, which representationally frees Henry from the narrator and grants him the sort of autonomy that Catherine and Eleanor enjoy by the end of the book. Once he stands firmly and solely within the depicted world of the novel, he can go on with his nuptial duties long after the final paradox on the final page of the book. What Catherine has not learned along with us, from the form of the novel, she will learn from the narrator's kindred spirit, who has now moved to her side. Henry, a clergyman like her father, can carry her off to Woodston, which is a kind of Fullerton plus civilization, and can improve the stock moralizing of her mother's Mirror (or of the narrator's final, tongue-in-cheek sententiousness) into a moral perceptiveness answerable to experience.

Our education is so parallel with Catherine's that we might be expected to have a formal equivalent, within the process of reading our novel, to the irony of complementary perspectives which she must learn to apply to 'reading' real life. That formal equivalent is, of course, the necessary ambiguity of the narrative in terms of its freedom from and dependence upon the hackneyed devices of fiction, and in terms of its priority to and dependence upon the characters whose lives it describes. The ambiguity can not be resolved, but just held in equilibrium like the figure and ground relationship in an optical illusion: are the ascending white stairs 'really,' when the drawing is turned about, black stairs going down? We conceive the illusion only by maintaining both possibilities at once. Austen's way of keeping this equilibrium is, as far as I know, original enough, although her self-consciousness about the powers of the novel points back to her legacy from Fielding and Sterne, who also knew that the epistemological patterns of novelistic form create a gulf between reader and character. The more the character approaches the freedom of the reader, the further apart grow their respective ways of dealing with reality, except perhaps in those books where form becomes a function of a protagonist's psychology. That is the kind of novel to which Austen turned after Northanger Abbey, with a subtlety and force of moral analysis not to be found here. Those virtues, fortunately for her reputation and for our pleasure, can compensate to us for her having abandoned the novel of ideas, and deserted the eighteenth-century—and modern—theme of the interplay between writer, reader, and character.