Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the journey began. It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful safety. Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky overturn to introduce them to the hero.
Thus is Austen’s heroine dispatched from a fictional country village, Fullerton, to Bath, where she will meet the Tilneys and the Thorpes. At seventeen, Catherine Morland has not yet seen “one amiable youth who could call forth her sensibility.” She’s taken to Bath for theatre and dancing by the distinguished Allens, and Mrs. Allen in particular is “admirably fitted to introduce a young lady into public”. Catherine’s prospects aren’t so good, as she is only “almost pretty”, she can’t write sonnets, and she “had no notion of drawing — not enough even to attempt a sketch of her lover’s profile.” But Austen, who intrudes a lot in Northanger Abbey, has promised that “Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.” Whether or not the novel has a hero is another thing, but if it does, he is not going to affect the rescue of a stranded Catherine, nor protect her from the inclement or criminal elements. The hour of departure is narrated with several such negations. For Mrs. Morland, there are not the “thousand alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved Catherine,” nor from her issue “Cautions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse.” Younger sister Sally does not insist that Catherine write her and tell her “the character of every new acquaintance.” The other Morlands know little of such intrigues as the reader might expect to envelop their Catherine, as there are no lords and baronets in Fullerton, nor a single foundling.
The disclamation of sensational plot points has to do with Catherine’s basic problem, which is that she reads too many Gothic novels. She’s jumpy, ready to think of the worst, given to ruminate “by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.” She should be at least a little worried about broken promises, phaetons, and Tilneys, but she’s distracted from those realities by such fictions as The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Midnight Bell. On that last point from Chapter I, that in Fullerton there was “not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door”, we can move to a later reference to Tom Jones by Catherine’s suitor, John Thorpe: “Novels are so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk”. The Monk, to be sure, is a Gothic, but can it be that John Thorpe, who’s full of “idle assertions and impudent falsehoods”— surely worse than Catherine’s worrying and probing—is as much a victim of Tom Jones as is she of The Mysteries of Udolpho? Perhaps the problem is broader than the particular distorted horrors of the gothic mode, and Northanger Abbey is more a novel about novels as such, than a commentary on realism versus genre. The sensible innocence of the Morlands is not owed just to their ignorance of creeping vines and ghastly faces at the window; they’ve also never known much of the “stuff and nonsense” of novels, of the salacious rather than the sinister. John Thorpe, inversely, is defined by vain exaggeration, and late in the plot a bit of vindictive deceit, more likely learned from Tom Jones’ Master Blifil than from any ghastly model.
Austen’s world, like a high school English class, is populated by people who do the reading, and people who don’t. Catherine, clearly, is among the former, as naturally so is the hero and eventual husband, Henry Tilney. It would seem that her brother James Morland, though proven naïve in matters of love, is at least an occasional reader. Dull Mrs. Allen is in the latter group, while Isabella reads and recommends to Catherine several Gothic novels. John Thorpe is purportedly a reader, though has read enough to know not to bother with novels. He’s a terrible “rattle” who owing to vanity “did not excel in giving those clearer insights, in making those plain which he had before made ambiguous”. Austen can’t simply call him a liar. There is one of Austen’s many too familiar and cringe-making exchanges in which Catherine recommends Udolpho to Thorpe, he scoffs and says he will only read Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, which are at least “amusing enough”, and she has to inform him that the same Mrs. Radcliffe is the author of that work. This is to be contrasted with what she is soon to learn of Henry Tilney, that he has read “hundreds and hundreds” of novels, including “all of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, and most of them with pleasure.”
James Wood wrote that “the habitual stance of the Austen heroine is that of the reader, one who reads and reflects upon the material of the novel before her”. Emma the character reads Emma the novel and is “thus on our side”. This metaphorical reading often takes the form of a retreat to privacy, some time given to reviewing the events of the story. According to Wood, this identification is made possible largely through Austen’s well-known innovation, free indirect discourse, which in Emma (published in 1815) is well developed. But Northanger Abbey, though published in 1817, was finished in 1803, several years before even the publication of Austen first novel, Sense & Sensibility, which tends to stay outside Elinor’s and Marianne’s minds by framing their thoughts, as in “What felt Elinor at that moment? Astonishment, that would have been painful as it was strong (…)” In this early work, then, much as it may have been revised before publication in 1816 and 1817, it is necessary for the heroine to be a literal reader, not of the events of the novel containing her, nor even of others’ conversation and letters, but of actual books. Henry Tilney tries to teach her something about reading other peoples’ motivations, when to her unsophisticated appraisal of his brother’s treatment of Isabella he says “your attributing my brother’s wish of dancing with Miss Thorpe to good-nature alone, convinced me of your being superior in good-nature yourself to all the rest of the world.” The skill in attribution is one that can be learned and practiced, and Tilney half seriously believes Catherine has more natural talent in this area than he does. Of women’s “understanding”, Tilney says that “nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.” This may be only a cheeky aphorism, but it seems that Catherine is using more of hers by the novel’s end. She only really learns through error, by making a Gothic misreading of General Tilney’s character, which Henry alone hears and corrects. It is really embarrassment in Henry’s presence, not just the discovery of error, that can change her. The lesson for Catherine is that for all the enjoyments in Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, “it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for.” Catherine has been reminded that she is not just in England, but in Austen’s England, where in the people’s “hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.” This prepares her for the trial and separation she will have to suffer before Tilney’s proposal, a circumstance which comes about through error and some malice (that mixture of good and bad), without supernatural involvement.
To give the angle of social realism vs. the Gothic its due, one can compare the approach to the titular property in Northanger Abbey with an especially torturous Gothic selection, the journey to a Spanish residencia housing a brood of vampires in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “Olalla”. From Northanger Abbey:
To pass between lodges of a modern appearance, to find herself with such ease in the very precincts of the Abbey, and driven so rapidly along a smooth, level road of fine gravel, without obstacle, alarm or solemnity of any kind, struck her as odd and inconsistent.”
And from “Olalla”:
Night had fallen dark before we came out upon a plateau, and drew up a little after, before a certain lump of superior blackness which I could only conjecture to be the residencia. Here, my guide, getting down from the cart, hooted and whistled for a long time in vain; until at last an old peasant man came towards us from somewhere in the surrounding dark, carrying a candle in his hand.
Catherine expects incident and impediment, or at least a rocky road. The weather too cooperates with conventional wishes, rather than with Catherine’s wish for menace: “The breeze had not seemed to waft the sighs of the murdered to her; it had wafted nothing worse than a thick mizzling rain” (how did “mizzle” become “drizzle”?). In what turns out to be a lengthy comic sequence, Catherine becomes obsessed with a black cabinet in her room at Northanger. Beyond two doors it encloses some drawers, and better yet, another door behind which she imagines a “cavity of importance”. She takes the roll of paper concealed inside. “Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale,” before she accidentally puts out her candle, and must wait to learn what is written on that paper. The next morning, she discovers that the first page is an “inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters,” followed by “hair-powder, shoe string and breeches-ball”, and a farrier’s bill. The mundane pushes away the fantastic, and the ever rational and well resolved ending of Northanger Abbey sees money as well as suitability, or indeed suitability defined in large part by money, unite Henry and Catherine.