Innocence and Ignorance in Northanger Abbey

In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, we find a character who, like others we have encountered this semester, operates with an innocence born of her virtue. Problematically, however, this innocence often renders these characters ignorant of the dishonorable motivations of others.  Fairly late in Austen's novel, Henry Tilney characterizes Catherine's approach to others as follows: "With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced? What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person's feelings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered?--but, how should I be influenced, what would be my inducement in acting so and so?" (90). While Tilney seems to hold her in high regard for this very reason, inherent in his statement is the danger Catherine potentially faces in her assumptions that others will interact with her with the same rectitude with which she constantly conducts herself.  I am interested in to what extent Austen posits, in this novel, innocence as a positive attribute, and what message about an oft attending ignorance she wishes to share with her readers. 

In the opening pages of the novel, in a comparison between the initial plot points of her work and those one would likely find in a Gothic novel, Austen writes, "But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out" (8). Austen's protagonist, Catherine Morland, seems to take this advice to heart later in the novel when, upon suddenly seeing the man with whom she has shared a brief flirtation, Henry Tilney, with another woman, she rightly assumes this woman to be his sister: "But guided only by what was simple and probable, it had never entered her head that Mr. Tilney could be married . . . he had never mentioned a wife, and he had acknowledged a sister . . . therefore, instead of . . . falling in a fit on Mrs. Allen's bosom, Catherine sat erect, in the perfect use of her senses" (35). Here, then, Austen shows Catherine to be quite capable of sound logic. Perhaps of import, however, is the fact that, in this instance, Catherine's rational calculations inform her only of the happiest of conclusions. It is in other relationships that we find Catherine unable to be so discerning.

For much of the novel, for instance, Catherine is oblivious to the fact that Isabella is using her to further her relationship with James, that John Thorpe intends to marry her, and that General Tilney falsely believes she and her family to be wealthy. What each of these seems to have in common is that none is something she would be happy to know; each would cause her anxiety. This anxiety, and a kind of willful ignorance Catherine seems to employ in order to combat it, is especially apparent in the scene in which Captain Tilney comes upon Isabella and Catherine talking in a quiet corner of the Pump-room, and Catherine is amazed by the impropriety with which Isabella engages in conversation with him: "She wished Isabella had talked more like her usual self, and not so much about money; and had not looked so well pleased at the sight of Captain Tilney" (101). Even with her misgivings so apparent, however, a few days' reflection finds Catherine yet "not allowing herself to suspect her friend" (101). Similarly, while she readily recognizes the amarous feelings Tilney has for her, she is oblivious to that romantic interest which does not please her, as evidenced by her amusing response to John Thorpe's flirtatious suggestion that she will be happy to see him at a later meeting: "There are very few people I am sorry to see" (86). Finally, pleased by the positive attention she receives from General Tilney, she seems not to question why this stern man would single her out for kind treatment, and she ignores hints that would complicate her estimation of him: "'Your father is so very liberal! He told me the other day, that he only valued money as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children." "The brother and sister looked at each other" (141).  Although Austen endears Catherine to her readers through the very innocence that allows her to think the best of others, it seems, given the many mishaps into which her ignorance of others' true motivations leads her, that Austen does not conceive of such innocence as entirely wise.
 

I wonder, finally, if Catherine's later escape into the fantastical Gothic is a means by which she is able to escape the anxieties of these relationships, thereby maintaining her innocence. It is interesting to note that, while she is long unable to suspect a new friend of duplicity, she readily suspects General Tilney of murdering or secreting his wife within the abbey.  Further, her imaginings of these hideous crimes seem to cause her relatively little uneasiness. At one point, for instance, Catherine determines she will seek out the hidden woman: "Till midnight, she supposed it would be in vain to search; but then . . . she would . . . steal out and look once more. The clock struck twelve—and Catherine had been half an hour asleep" (131). Soon disabused of her misconceptions by Henry, she admits to herself that "Charming as were all of Mrs. Radcliffe's works . . . it was not int them perhaps that human nature . . . was to be looked for" (137). It seems significant, then, that, no longer distracted by these romantic ideas, Catherine must now deal with reality. When, for instance, her ignorance of General Tilney's ulterior motives leads to the shock she experiences at her forced departure, she feels keenly the difference between imagined and actual suffering: ""Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been then—how mournfully superior in reality and substance! Her anxiety had foundation in fact, her fears in probability; and with a mind so occupied in the contemplation of actual and natural evil" (156). So embroiled has she been in the idea that General Tilney was a murderer, Catherine fails to detect, and protect herself from, that which is truly opprobrious in his character.  Both her own moral innocence and the innocence of reality to which her reading here contributes can be seen, then, as amounting to ignorance.  Did Austen share the view of many in the eighteenth century that certain types of fiction could prove so distracting as to cause a reader to fail to attend to the immediate necessities of his or her own life? 

On Attending the 44th Annual Meeting of ASECS

On Thursday, April 4^th, I had the pleasure of attending the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Cleveland, Ohio. The first panel I attended was titled "Novel Experiments," and its purpose was to discuss to what extent and under what conditions the novel may be accurately termed an experiment. The first panelist, Jenny Davidson of Columbia University, argued that calling the novel experimental is of little use if the term is applied too generally. Any fiction writing may be called experimental, she asserts, in that, unless an act of plagiarism, it is a result of some amount of innovation; to call the novel an experiment in this sense, then, is meaningless. Davidson is more interested in what authors were more experimental than others, and how so. She offers Richardson and Austen as examples of particularly experimental writers, suggesting that their work may be viewed from novel to novel as a series of experiments in which one significant variable is changed, with differing results. For instance, Richardson's Sir Grandison may be seen as an experiment building on Pamela and Clarissa but with the new variable that its "repository of virtue" is a man. Anne Stevens of the University of Nevada argued, in a paper titled "Experiments and Microgenres," that it is futile to attempt to discern which of the earliest novels may be appropriately called "experimental" until the term "novel" itself has a firm definition. She makes the excellent point that early novels are considered experimental only against the conventions of later novels and, thus, that their designation as such is anachronistic. She believes these earlier novels may be more aptly described as simply innovative. As examples of innovation, she describes the many "microgenres" that emerged during the eighteenth-century, such as "season" novels, in which, for example, a summer in Bath or a winter in Dublin may be described, and "speaking object" novels, in which the novel's narrator is not human. An amusing example of the latter that she offered is The History and Adventures of a Lady's Slippers and Shoes, Written by Themselves. Finally, panelist Katarzyna Bartoszynska of Bilkent University made an argument, in her presentation, for the early Gothic novel as an experiment.   She equates the novel's early development with the birth of realism, and suggests that, contrary to what one might assume, the Gothic genre actually helped train readers to better approach realism. An imperative of early fiction, she opines, was to teach readers how to engage with texts that were literally unbelievable yet aesthetically effective; in other words, readers had to learn that a story need not be "true" in order to be of value. The Gothic novel may be seen, then, as key to the development of fiction in that its uncanny elements were particularly helpful in teaching readers to suspend their disbelief.

The second and third panels I attended were part of a series called "Women Outside the Blue Stocking Circle." The purpose of these panels was to explore the lives and careers of those women writers that were not members of the Blue Stocking Society and, often, to discuss how and why these writers worked without the support of this influential group. Presenting a paper titled "The Curious Case of Charlotte Lennox," Susan K. Howard of Dusquesne University focused on those aspects of Lennox's writing and personal life that likely excluded her from the Blue Stocking Society. That which most divided Lennox from members of the society was most likely the fact that, while the latter engaged with literature as part of their leisure time activities, Lennox wrote in order to survive and support her family. For Lennox, writing was a business, and one which she could simply not afford to take lightly. In her relationships with mentors Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, for instance, Lennox readily made demands about the publication of her work and expressed her discontent with the market. What interested me most about this portrait of Lennox was that she operated with what was considered an "unfeminine directness," and the fact that this served her in her career. Howard offered the following illuminating characterization: "She was widely read, but nobody liked her." In the next presentation, of a paper titled "A Life Beyond Loveliness: What Can Be Learned from the Latter Days of Melesina Trench," Katharine Kittredge of Ithaca College described the unusual career of this woman writer.  Well educated in her childhood, Trench gave up intellectual pursuits in her early adult life as a wife and mother, instead spending her time socializing or in leisure activities.  Trench later described this period as one in which she experienced an "absence of reflection." Interestingly, Trench became a writer in her mid-forties, after the death of her husband. A friendship she developed with another women writer, Mary Leadbetter, was instrumental in her career. Afraid that attempts to have her work published would be viewed as too aggressive, Trench sent her work to her friend with indirect suggestions as to which newspapers would perhaps be interested in it, and Leadbetter, wishing to support her friend, saw to it that Trench's work was published. In her paper, then, Kittredge offers an example of how a relationship between women writers can "embolden" and "enable" them. The next panelist, William McCarthy of Iowa State University, is in the earlier stages of a project called "Was Anna Letitia Barbauld, Because Not a Bluestocking, a No Stocking?" McCarthy asserts that, though Barbauld is often perceived as a Blue Stocking, she lived far from London and cannot be accurately described as having been influenced by or influential in this group. His current work is focused on simply surveying, therefore, what relationships could have been of consequence in Barbauld's career: Who were the women she knew, and to what extent? To this end, then, McCarthy lists the women writers with whom it is documented that Barbauld corresponded or engaged socially and describes the duration and nature of these engagements. What he has found thus far is that each of these relationships had been too brief or superficial to be considered of genuine impact on Barbauld's work. He concludes that Barbauld's had many female friendships, but none that were intellectual in nature and that, therefore, she could have benefited from membership in the Blue Stocking Society.

In the second panel of the Blue Stocking series, Eve Tavor Bannet of Oklahoma University began with a paper titled "'Wretched Uniques': Women's Genteel Beggary in Mrs. Bennett and Her Contemporaries." Bannet's work, in its focus on the penury experienced by writer Anna Maria Bennett, is concerned with the relationship between female authorship and female poverty. In her novel The Beggar Girl, Bennett portrays the plight of a gentlewoman newly impoverished, and the extent to which she falls prey to both vicious men and women. At the time, apparently, a common view of the poor was that they were deserving of their lot. Bennett's point in this novel, then, is to demonstrate the surprising ease with which, in the shifting economic structures of the time, members of the gentility, and especially women, could fall into hardship. Next, Cynthia Roman of Yale, in her presentation on print seller Hannah Humphrey, offered the career of Humphrey as an example of a highly successful and influential eighteenth-century businesswoman. As the owner of a print shop specializing in satirical prints, Humphrey operated far outside the conservative Blue Stocking Society. As an unmarried woman, Humphrey ran her business entirely independently, and did so with remarkable success. Her political savvy, her understanding of cultural trends, and her sound judgment of the graphic arts served her incredibly well. As a result, Humphrey built a highly successful career for herself and significantly influenced public opinion. Finally, in his paper "'Observe Her Heedfully': Family, Friendship, and a Lady's Life of Reading," panelist Mark Towsey of the University of Liverpool explores what can be known about eighteenth-century Scottish women by their reading habits and patterns and asks the following question: "Must a woman have published in order to be considered literary or an intellectual?" To argue against this assumption, Towsey offers the example of Elizabeth Rose, a woman whose reading experiences are heavily documented. Available for study, for instance, are lists of the books she read and that were included in her personal library, journals in which she reflected on her readings, and letters in which she discussed and recommended books. Evident especially in this correspondence is that eighteenth-century anxiety about women's reading that we have discussed extensively in class. Rose criticizes much of the literature she reads and urges her friends and family members to avoid entirely or attend to only certain sections of particular books. She also feels strongly, however, about the potential of reading as a pedagogical tool. Ultimately, in this portrait of Rose, Towsey presents women as, in their role as readers and interpreters of literature, intellectual and cultural agents in their own right, both as individuals and collectively.

Attending ASECS was an extremely edifying experience. Given the panels I attended, I of course learned a great deal about the development of the novel as a genre and about women writers of the eighteenth century. As this was the first national conference I have had the opportunity to attend, I also gained much valuable information about the nature of conferences in general. I had previously thought that conferences served simply as opportunities for scholars to present their finished works. I know now that many use such meetings to test new ideas or to build on earlier ones, to gauge whether a proposed topic is worthy of future exploration and to get feedback as to what other lines of inquiry their own questions may engender. I especially appreciated the fact that, among the questions asked of the panelists, there were many "Have you read . . . ?!" and "You have to read . . . !" It was so neat to witness the enthusiasm with which these scholars approached their and others' work, and it made me all the more excited to participate in such conversations in the future.