I don't know that René Girard ever said much about Jane Austen. A quick search on Bing would suggest not, although others have applied his approach. I don't think Girard's understanding of mimesis and mimetic rivalry is, in any case, a good approach to Austen. But some sort of mimetic rivalry is at work here.
On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I'd like to suggest that the the friendship between Morland and John Thorpe is based on Morland's admiration for Thorpe. And we can see this (okay maybe there is some evidence for my view :-) in the sort of figure Thorpe cuts. We might miss this at first reading because we get to see John Thorpe's failings even more quickly than is the case with his sister.
BUT, we get to see those failings through Catherine's eyes. And Catherine is most emphatically not in love with John Thorpe. (Morland, in love with Isabella, cannot do as well at seeing her faults and comes perilously close to repeating Mr. Allen's mistake.) If we step back and consider what sort of companion John Thorpe would make at university, I think we get a different figure. He likes all the guy things and he talks them up rather well. It is easy to see how a relatively poor provincial parson's son could decide he wanted to become just like him. This is true even though Morland clearly sees through some of Thorpe's claims about his horse's abilities for example.
And here is a question. Right from the beginning, John Thorpe is under the misapprehension that Morland is wealthier than he is. Where did he get this idea? Is there any more likely explanation than that Morland responded to Thorpe's bragging with some of his own?
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