My professor was like Henry, but of course, as I quickly realized, they were both like Henry’s creator. Playful, impish, provoking: this was Austen exactly, and never more so than in Northanger Abbey. Austen used the novel to make us her students. Henry was her surrogate, and Catherine was ours, and she went about teaching just the way that he did. In fact, she taught, in part, through him. Everything he said to Catherine she was also necessarily saying to us. When Henry ridiculed the conventions of polite chatter, it was the empty gestures of our own conversations that we inevitably thought of. When he rearranged Catherine’s mental categories, it was our sluggish ideas that started to wake up and stir.
But she also did far more than that. Henry taught, in that first scene, through impersonation. He pretended to become someone else—set smile, softened voice, simpering air—and proceeded to act that character out in a way that revealed the character’s folly to Catherine, his audience. Austen did not pretend to become someone else, but she certainly did impersonate any number of characters. “Yes, my dear” and “This is my favourite place” and “I defy any man in England”: these were the equivalents of Henry’s “Have you been long in Bath, madam?”—satiric performances meant to call our attention to behavior we normally take for granted. Austen, like Henry, taught by showing—which means, by arousing. By putting something in front of us and expecting us to think about it.
She wrote novels, not essays, and more than just about any other author, she refused to mar her novels by putting essays into them. She never lectured, never explained: never interrupted her stories to hold forth on what she wanted us to think they meant, or deliver her opinions on the state of the world. She also never tampered with her characters by putting her own ideas into their mouths. Writing to her sister, Cassandra, upon the publication of Pride and Prejudice, she sketched out her philosophy about these matters, albeit in the ironically inverted way in which her letters often spoke of serious things. “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling,” she now professed to think about the novel, “—it wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte.” A cackle of authorial delight, followed by a glance at the degenerate practices of lesser novelists.
Austen was never didactic, and she didn’t like didactic people, either. In Pride and Prejudice, Mary Bennet was fond of quoting heavy books, and Mr. Collins was fond of reading them aloud, and both of them were held up as fools. Henry never “told” Catherine anything—except once, and then Austen gently laughed at him, too. He and Catherine and his sister, Eleanor, who had also befriended the heroine, were taking a walk to the top of a hill overlooking the town of Bath. The Tilneys, “viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing,” were soon deciding “on its capability of being formed into pictures.” Austen was referring here to the contemporary vogue for the “picturesque,” landscapes that conformed to a certain idea of visual beauty: moody skies, gnarled trees, ruined shacks, and so forth, all arranged according to the laws of pictorial art. But Catherine knew nothing of this, so Henry was only too happy to fill her in:
She confessed and lamented her want of knowledge, declared that she would give anything in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.
In fact, as we know from her family, Austen was a great devotee of the picturesque herself, just as she loved the gothic novel. But she understood that any art or idea or pattern of behavior, left unexamined, hardens into cliché. Once you begin taking it too seriously, you’re only a step away from taking yourself too seriously, and before you know it, you start to sound like Mr. Collins, “lecturing” and “instructing” instead of laughing and surprising. Your students, in turn, their minds improved by your enlightened guidance—“she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape”—start talking nonsense.
Now I understood why the novel had to begin in the odd way that it did. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy,” the first sentence read, “would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” The line was a joke about the conventions of gothic fiction, one that the rest of the first chapter went on to elaborate. Catherine’s father “was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters,” “there was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door,” and so forth. That much was obvious. But now I realized that the first sentence was also a way of calling attention to the fact that this novel, too, would necessarily trade in conventions. A heroine and a romance, a Mr. Wrong and a Mr. Right, perils and misunderstandings, conflicts and complications, revelations and reversals, and at last, a happy ending: these were the conventions that Austen herself employed in every one of her novels, and she could not have done without them any more than a detective novelist can do without a corpse. Yet she didn’t want us to get sucked in by her conventions, either—didn’t want us to let ourselves be lulled into the trance of gullibility that readers are always falling into, mistaking an artificial version of reality for the genuine article. Stay awake, Austen was telling us. Don’t take things for granted, not even the things I’m telling you myself.
In other words, pay attention. And pay attention, above all, to your own feelings, because the world is always trying to get you to lie to yourself about them. “‘Very agreeable indeed,’ she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.” Our feelings, Austen was saying, are sometimes impolite and often inconvenient for the people around us. Friends and relatives are apt to tell us, instead, what we should be feeling—what we supposedly are feeling—if only to make their own lives easier or more exciting. This was Isabella, talking to Catherine about Henry, whom at that point the heroine had met only once:
“Nay, I cannot blame you. . . . Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else. Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting, that does not relate to the beloved object! I can perfectly comprehend your feelings.”
“But you should not persuade me that I think so very much about Mr. Tilney, for perhaps I may never see him again.”
“Not see him again! My dearest creature, do not talk of it. I am sure you would be miserable if you thought so!”
Isabella, remember, was the one who had introduced the heroine to all those romantic novels. She wanted her friend’s life (her own, in other words, by proxy) to be full of the same extravagant emotions she had been reading about, even if they ended up making Catherine unhappy—or rather, especially if they did.
But Henry behaved in exactly the opposite fashion. In a scene much later in the novel that Austen made a point of pairing with this one, Henry and Catherine conducted the same kind of dialogue about Isabella herself. By this time, Isabella had shown her true colors as the false schemer she really was, and the girls’ friendship was at an end: