What Isabella pretends to have

Okay, here is what I think the problem is. Starting with chapter six in bk 1, a few texts, This is Isabella speaking:

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong. I told Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was to tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow Miss Andrews to be as beautiful as an angel. The men think us incapable of real friendship, you know, and I am determined to show them the difference.

Isabella claims to be a great example of female friendship here but on what basis does she claim it. As the highlighted bits show, it is on the basis of her strong feelings.

Or consider the conversation that Isabella and Catherine have about men's complexions. Isabella begins it with a question:

By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair?”

“I hardly know. I never much thought about it. Something between both, I think. Brown — not fair, and — and not very dark.”

“Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I have not forgot your description of Mr. Tilney — ‘a brown skin, with dark eyes, and rather dark hair.’ Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as to complexion — do you know — I like a sallow better than any other. You must not betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance answering that description.”

“Betray you! What do you mean?”

“Nay, do not distress me. I believe I have said too much. Let us drop the subject.”

Catherine, in some amazement, complied.

Isabella is falling over herself trying to make Catherine aware of her feelings for Catherine's brother here very studiously describing his complexion as her favourite as Catherine has just unconsciously described Henry Tilney's as her favourite.

A final example, for this I jump ahead to chapter 11. Catherine has missed her country walk with the Tilney's and Isabella is trying to convince her that it is the Tilney's fault:

It was amazingly shocking, to be sure; but the Tilneys were entirely to blame. Why were not they more punctual? It was dirty, indeed, but what did that signify? I am sure John and I should not have minded it. I never mind going through anything, where a friend is concerned; that is my disposition, and John is just the same; he has amazing strong feelings.

Again, she claims strong feelings as the basis of her moral behaviour. We can see how strong they aren't by how she immediately loses interest in them to comment on the hand Catherine has just been dealt.

The reason Isabella can never get Catherine to read her feelings is that she doesn't have feelings in the first place. All she has is a series of passing fancies that conveniently match up with her personal interests.

Yes, Isabella lies, exaggerates and is utterly inconstant in her friendship but the reason this keeps happening, or, rather, the reason she never makes any genuine connections, is that she has no feelings herself. When she tells Catherine that she and James have discovered their feelings are identical on all the important things, we can be certain Isabella's feelings here are conforming with those of James Morland to make him love her and no other reason. Why, because she has no feelings of her own.

She lacks feelings, sentiments or, to put it another way, sensibility. Because she has no sensibility, no response to anything, she is driven entirely by her self interest.

Okay smart guy

What is wrong with Isabella then?

I think the question is trickier than we might think because it isn't a matter of identifying her vices but in figuring out what is missing. Everybody has weaknesses and vices—how well we respond or not is determined by how well we have built our character.

Huh?

I think the problem is the missing virtue. In the moral tradition that Austen follows, the primary moral goal is to be a certain sort of person; the goal is to build a certain sort of character. It's not enough to be prudent or amiable or constant. The good person uses these things to build a complete woman or man.

As a later writer put it, Isabella's failing is that she is only part of a person pretending to be whole.

Furthermore, I would argue that the thing she is missing is hidden right on the surface. What Isabella is missing is the thing she is always pretending to have.

Isabella's vices

A now we're getting to the fun stuff because what could be more fun that tear Isabella to little shreds?

But it is so complicated. Consider, for example, the pedagogical relationship. The what you say? The pedagogical relationship; there is one in every Austen novel. In Northanger Abbey it is between Catherine and Miss Tilney, in Sense and Sensibility it is between Marianne and Elinor, in Pride and Prejudice it is (big shift here*) between Elizabeth and Darcy, in Emma it is Emma and Mr. Knightly and in Mansfield Park it is between Fanny and Edmund.

So what you say? Well lets have a look ahead to Chapter 10 wherein Catherine meets Miss Tilney (and we can't help but notice that she is not nearly so quick to move to Christian names as Isabella was) at the Pump-room. And there she has a conversation towards the end of which Catherine "artlessly" blurts out that Miss Tilney's brother dances well. The conversation carries on in a like manner fora while and concludes with the following summation by our author:

... and they parted — on Miss Tilney's side with some knowledge of her new acquaintance's feelings, and on Catherine's, without the smallest consciousness of having explained them.

All of which tells me that it is time to learn to suck eggs again. Why? Because what Catherine has unconsciously achieved with Miss Tilney is exactly the thing that Isabella is trying to achieve consciously over and over again. Beginning with her gentle sigh over the clergy and her partiality to young men in the profession on, Isabella repeatedly tries to get Catherine to be able to read her feelings.

What exactly is so wrong about what Isabella does and what is so right about Catherine herself does in her pedagogical relationship with Miss Tilney?





* It's not just that the pedagogical relationship is between a man and a woman in love from P & P on, it is also reciprocal with each party having as much to learn from the other. Miss Tilney, OTOH, learns nothing from Catherine and while Elinor might learn something from Marianne she does not profit nearly so much as her sister from the relationship.

Beauty

Isabella's beauty is not anything to sneer at as her younger sisters and Catherine readily appreciate. Beauty is, of course, partly genetic and that is to say unearned in modern terms. The ancients did not see it that way. Beauty to them meant blessed by the gods and fate and they admired such people.

We moderns do so as well but we are hypocrites about it and affect not to until a beautiful young woman or man walks into the room.

But beauty is also an achievement and I think we can credit Isabella with improving on what her genes have given her as demonstrated by Austen's remark that her less attractive sisters have done well by imitating her.

In terms contemporary to Austen, the beautiful was often contrasted with the sublime. The source of the distinction was Burke and he associated the beautiful with the feminine, with curves and with all that inclined us to fall in love. As much as he liked the beautiful, he rated it below the sublime which he associated with the masculine, with what is jagged and powerful and, if we get too close, dangerous. Nine million people before me have used the Alps as an example of the sublime and I see no reason to break with tradition on this.

From some distance, however, the sublime was not only safe but inspiring and morally healthful. One example of this pertinent to Austen herself is Ellena in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian. While held prsioner and threatened with possible death or forced acceptance of the veil, Ellena is shored up, fortified because she can see the sublime majesty of the mountains around the monastery.

Austen to some extent reverses this. She picks the beautiful over the sublime and her heroines get sustenance from exposure to good manners and domestic beauty. A big part of what we might, for lack of a better term, call Austen's feminism is tied up in her emphasis on the beautiful in contrast to the masculine sublime.

So the bad news is, as much as we want to start hating Isabella as quickly as possible, her beauty is a real virtue in Austen's eyes just as it was for the ancients; all beauty especially female beauty is a positive thing to Austen.

Isabella's virtues

As I wrote quite a few posts ago, Alasdair MacIntyre can't see that physical strength is a virtue in a Homeric hero such as Odysseus He has similar problems with Penelope who describes as her virtue what MacIntyre would prefer to call her charms.

And, as with strength, we all like to pretend we agree. Something genetically determined such as beauty cannot, we say, possibly be a virtue. And then we all turn around and act as if it were a virtue because it matters to us and matters very much.

And here we have Isabella Thorpe and both Catherine Morland and her brother are attracted to her in a large part because of her beauty. It would be too much to say she is exactly what Mrs. Bennett was when Mr. Bennett first fell in love with her and then married her but we might say the two women are of a general type and James would do well not to marry her.