What to make of the end (4)

Okay, but Austen has been burlesquing something in this novel right? You aren't denying that are you Jules?

No, I don't deny it. And I'll grant that I have been pig-headedly holding off the burlesque as long as I could; always focusing on other aspects of the novel. But there is a reason for this. I think that the target of the burlesque is not the novels but some of the women who read them. And I think that always was the target.

And I still stand by my earlier arguments that this book is not, despite nine million other people saying it is, a Gothic burlesque. It contains a burlesque yes, but my house is not a kitchen because it contains a kitchen.

In that earlier post, I a later book called The Heroine by Eaton Stannard that was written later than Northanger Abbey but published before it. That book actually does what people say this one does. It has a heroine who imagines herself to be like the heroine of a Gothic novel.

I think Austen's point is rather the opposite. She did not, as a lot of male critics of her time did, blame novels for causing women to assume a lot of fanciful nonsense. She thought women behaved like heroines of romantic fiction rather than assuming the moral responsibilities of assuming their roles in life all too easily without any help at all. And I don't think that anyone who has read her novels can deny this. Starting with Mrs. Allen here and carrying on through Mrs. Dashwood, Mrs. Bennett, Mrs. Norris, Mrs Betram. Elizabeth Elliot and (I hope you are sitting down for this one) Emma Woodhouse, Austen targets the follies of women of her age with a pen dipped in acid.

(She doesn't spare the men either but there the criticism is presented differently and I'll get to it with Sense and Sensibility.)

And I think she tells us this is her target in plain language here in Northanger Abbey:

Feelings rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her own dignity injured by this ready condemnation — instead of proudly resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else — she took to herself all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause.

You might find the sort of "feelings heroic" that Austen condemns here in a Gothic novel, although you don't find much of it in Ann Radcliffe. But, even if, you don't have to go anywhere so exotic to find it. Walk across any university campus in the land and you will find women (and men) behaving exactly like this. Austen saw it all around her. And I think she also saw it in herself. And that is what she set out to mock here.

In the process, I think she discovered something else. Remember that Austen is already writing her other novels. Northanger Abbey is not the first novel she starts writing it is only the first one she manages to finish to her satisfaction (at the time, later she was not satisfied with it). It's a very different book from the first drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, originally called Mariann and Elinor and First Impressions. Those drafts were epistolary novels, written entirely in letters like those of Richardson, whom she obviously admired profoundly.

I speculated at the beginning of my blogging Northanger Abbey that Austen undertook this burlesque as result of her disappointment in those other efforts. She fell back on something she knew she could do well. Somewhere in the middle of writing, though, I think she realized that she had something good here. That underneath any Radcliffe-like plot, there had to be a real story. A story not requiring all those improbable adventures that could not happen in the modern England that both Radcliffe and Austen loved.

You can find this plot yourself in any Radcliffe book if you care to do the archeology. It's true even today of mystery, fantasy and science fiction. Those genre books that aren't trash, are worth reading for the genuine story under the murder. In Northanger Abbey I think Austen found that genuine story kept getting expanded until all that was left of the burlesque was four chapters squeezed towards the end.

PG Wodehouse once said that his books were like musical comedies without the music. Ann Radcliffe's books are haunted by history. No heroine of hers can get through life without the towering evils of the old Catholic world of superstition and intrigue hovering over her. Jane Austen's novels are a lot like the those Radcliffe novels with all that Romantic flavour taken out.