A Second Look into Northanger Abbey

References in parentheses are to chapters; those in brackets are endnotes.


This is, I believe, an authentic second look, though the first would have contained little to detain the reader.  In the front of my Dolphin paperback, at the age of sixteen, I scrawled “key to understanding the text – page 110” where the underlined passage has Isabella declaring, “But this is idle talking!”  I recall in that period mentioning Austen as an author whose value I could better recognize than appreciate. This callow judgment was doubtless due to simple gender identification – her heroines tend to be young ladies who, when not discussing their frocks or their hair, consider marriage candidates, often favoring those blessed with a becoming measure of wealth.  This time round I aspire to a considerably more specific (if not particularly novel) evaluation which turns out to be considerably more positive as well.  At the time of that first reading I was not far from the age of Catherine Morland and likely had more in common with her than I suspected.


     Northanger Abbey is a delight, brief, with a frothy little plot featuring an impossibly ingenuous ingénue and a somewhat wiser but no less unspoiled male lead. It scintillates with wit and the elaborate circumlocutions that ornamented polite conversations of the time. If the narrative movement is slow and a bit repetitive during the Bath chapters and then too swiftly finds a felicitous denouement in the end, the reader is too charmed by the characters and amused by the artificiality of their language to complain.

     The characters’ personalities are expressed verbally not only in what say, but notably in their taste in fiction. Indeed, the simplest way to characterize Austen’s Northanger Abbey is as a satire on the fashion for Gothic novels and so it is. Yet the trajectory of plot has only a limited link to this theme. In the tale of Catherine’s coming of age, her passing from girl to wife, her literary taste forms only a part, and in the depiction of a hypocritical and often selfish beau monde, novel-reading is a venial charge. Far from betraying a lack of unity – which might be unsurprising in a first novel – the reading of books is skillfully linked in the narrative to the reading of everyday life. Decoding the treatment of experience in works of art turns out to be little different from processing one’s sense impressions, themselves signs of reality. Discernment based on experience is critical to both.

     Austen does not merely satirize the fashion for Gothic novels. She satirizes as well her own novelistic practices in ways that often suggest an ironic use of her own narrative voice, thus generating a series of points of view: that of the popular novelist, that of the typical reader, that of her own persona, and that that is implied to be her own. She had described Catherine at the outset as an unlikely heroine and later, in one of her recurrent self-reflective passages (V) she points to one point of difference between the novelistic heroine and their representative in the young Miss Morland. With a gay play of wit, she notes in her novel with a novel-reading heroine, that people in novels do not read novels.

     Throughout the book, sometimes within a single paragraph or sentence, the view of fiction oscillates, often to the point of ambiguity. In the first place, novels must surely be good because, after all, the writer is writing and the reader reading a novel. After both actively assenting to the value of stories in practice, it would be odd if they were to condemn them in theory.

     Yet the very first sentence problematizes the appreciation of novels. By indicating that Catherine is far from a conventional heroine, Austen implies a conservable gap between fiction and reality. The implication is that Catherine is a more or less ordinary, if exemplary, specimen of (seventeen-year-old) womanhood and that the Gothic authors are spinners of fantasies. The implausibility of the plots dreamed up by Mrs. Radcliffe and others is indeed the source of much of the comedy of Northanger Abbey.

     Yet it is true that Austen repeatedly ridicules the melodramatic conventions of the Gothic novel. She is most ridiculous when imagining melodramatic goings-on in the abbey. Her investigation of the bureau in her room which turns out to contain nothing more than a batch of old laundry receipts causes her to scold herself for her imagination, yet she goes on to look into Mrs. Tilney’s old room, thinking her perhaps dead or imprisoned only to be embarrassed by her discovery by Henry who guesses at her speculations.

     Why then do people read novels, is they care so misleading about lived experience? For the Gothic vogue, Austen is clear enough. Isabella as a woman of fashion is up on all the novels, and when she provides her new friend with a reading list, Catherine asks, “Are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” (VI) The sensation, the “horridness,” of the plots with their mysterious un-English settings and their supernatural accoutrements, heightened by suspense, is their reason for being.

     The thrill of crime fiction, which flourishes yet today, is the basis for a bit of comic business when Catherine “solemnly” “something very shocking will soon come out in England.” (XIV) “Startled,” Eleanor Tilney asks for details and is not reassured when Catherine assures her that the affair “will be more horrible than anything we have met with yet,” “uncommonly dreadful,” with “murder and everything of the kind.” It turns out she is talking of “a new publication . . . in three duodecimo volumes.”

     A further defense of fiction may be inferred from its partisans. Henry Tilney, who is charming to a fault, surprises Catherine by identifying himself as a novel reader and declaring, that anyone not susceptible to the pleasure in a good novel must be “intolerably stupid.” (XIV) as evidenced he recalls reading Udolpho aloud with his sister and plunging to the end while she wrote a note. He is impelled by irresistible desire. “I am proud when I reflect on it, and I think it must establish me in your good opinion.” He suggests here that familiarity with literature is likely to make a person more moral and that a man of sensibility, receptive to the play of emotions offered by fiction, is likely to be sympathetic, altruistic, and indeed moral in lived experience.

     From his first introduction James Thorpe exhibits fatuous, self-interested behavior. When Catherine asks him if he has read Udolpho, he replies, “Oh, Lord! not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.” This does not preclude his saying he might go in for an “amusing” story, something with “fun and nature.” Then in a turn of incidental wit, Austen has him condemn Burney’s Camilla as “the horridest nonsense.”) (VII) [2] In a reversal of Henry’s emotional sensibility, James Thorpe is incapable of imagining the feeling s of another person either on the page or across the room.

     The case of General Tilney illuminates Austen’s model for novel-reading that enriches rather than misleads the reader’s view of the world. Though Catherine’s suspicions that the general has killed or imprisoned his wife are fantasies, grounded in melodramatic fiction, he turns out to be a monster of greed and rudeness in fact. The story-teller tells the truth, but indirectly, by implication, using refraction. Just as Catherine had taken everyone at their word, unable to conceive of mendacious or wicked people, she likewise took her the narratives of Mrs. Radcliffe and others literally. When she enters a genuine abbey, its renovations do not correspond to her expectations, but its halls turn out to hold the potential for drama and romance all the same.

     Not only can literary texts benefit from such interpretation. Many experiences of everyday life require analogous decoding, even if here the “everyday life” is itself contained on a page of a novel, suggesting an infinite regression of symbolic forms. Signs seem always to refer to other signs and the observer must manage their implications in a consistently provisional way. Thus Henry amuses himself by playing the pedagogue with Catherine (XIV), insisting on the older meaning for the word “nice.” Eleanor and the reader know that he only seems to be making a philological distinction; in reality he is flirting with Catherine. [1] Similarly, when they are about to arrive at Northanger Abbey and Henry spins out a playful Gothic pastiche description of his home, his goal is not to provide information about the abbey’s real characteristics, but rather to tease the ingenuous Miss Morland. (XX)

     These experiences, compounded with what she has seen in the public rooms of Bath to make her doubt Isabella’s sincerity and good nature, including her dalliance with Captain Tilney , lead Catherine to a more nuanced view of both spoken and written “truth.” What people say may not be literally true, yet it is not random either, but rather deeply meaningful in novels and life alike. Such correspondences between signifier and signified typify all story from the myth of Oedipus to one’s memory of this morning’s breakfast.

     All experiences, however, are not equally meaningful. For Austen novels situated between the dryasdust pedantry of a history of England (which lacks any entertainment value) and the “coarse” popular journalism of the Spectator (which lacks meaning). Ideally in fiction one may find “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” (V)

     This stirring encomium for literature was doubtless based on the traditional Horatian formula according to which poetry or imaginative literature in general is expected to teach and delight. The thrills of horror and suspense are what attract the reader to the deeper knowledge of human nature that comes through a wide experience either in books or in drawing rooms. Neither heroines from books nor acquaintances from the Pump Room are to be taken at face value. Lacking this refracted reading, both literature and last night’s chitchat are indeed nothing but “idle talking.”



1. Similarly, in X Henry playfully constructs an analogy between dance partners and marriage partners. Considering Catherine’s naiveté he seems to be entertaining primarily himself. Henry, though uniformly civil, hardly exhibits the passion often expected of a male lead. His marriage seems occasioned more than anything by his wish to redeem his father’s rudeness. If there is never anything to dislike about him, he seems also to have little romantic enthusiasm.

2. The word “horrid” seems to have been enjoying a vogue at the time. See, for instance Isabella’s exclaiming “horrid!” in X.

Godwin's Theatre of Calamity

References in parentheses are cited by part and chapter.

     Godwin may have conceived of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams as a Tendenzroman, and the theme is certainly asserted with little room for doubt. The book’s unfortunate protagonist, a clever and idealistic youth of serious moral character, suffers all but constantly from the irrational persecution of a member of the ruling class, whose imperious power is unjust always and susceptible to aggravated criminal misuse. The legal system is condemned in the strongest terms for its injustice and inhumanity. The novel’s revolutionary implications did not escape the bookseller or the authorities and Godwin was first dissuaded from his original ending and then convinced to remove a preface that indicated the book meant to illustrate “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” Godwin arranged for its publication on the very day Prime Minister William Pitt suspended habeas corpus and began rounding up the radicals of the London Corresponding Society. [1] Stage adaptations were banned, though Sheridan presented one under a different title.
     Countless passages throughout the book remind the reader that morality and justice have little to do with the operations of government, that the wealthy and privileged are empowered to do as they will while the poor make do as they must. Godwin’s position as a philosophical anarchist is evident from his non-fiction works, [2] and he presents with passion and conviction a shocking story of “the gore-dripping robes of authority.” ( III, 1) The book’s title (anticipating Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with which Godwin’s book might be profitably contrasted) insists on its intention to break through what Rexroth used to call the Social Lie and reveal the simple fact of the absolute amorality of government by the selfish.
     Yet it is difficult to view the novel in only that way. The theme of social protest is surely distorted by the depiction of the oppressor Falkland who is anything but a typical aristocrat just as Caleb is not a representative worker. Falkland in fact seems an extraordinarily unselfish and moral person whose sense of noblesse oblige is part of his polished and sophisticated manners. His degradation arises not from simple greed (as does the corruption of the ruling class under any system) but rather from his obsessive idealistic concern about honor and reputation. The reader never hears of how he makes his money. Though he might be viewed as an etiolated aristocrat whose decadence presages the end of his class’s governance, the central protest is not economic but legal. The wealthy can manipulate the law.
     But in the conclusion as it stood in the first edition, Williams is implicated in similarly using legal process for private ends. Though he had long made it a point of pride not to reveal his one-time employer’s blood-guilt, he ultimately does, not to secure a disinterested retribution, but in revenge. He relates the tale of his personal “theatre of calamity” (I, 1) retrospectively so the pathetic (if not quite tragic) conclusion was never in doubt and Caleb ends by thinking himself more a sinner than his persecutor. Though at the outset he had said he wrote in hopes that “posterity” might “render me a justice, which my contemporaries refuse,” (I, 1) but he ends having given up on himself – he says “I have no character that I wish to vindicate” -- and hoping only that his antagonist “may be fully understood.” (Postscript) Even Falkland lauds Williams’ “greatness and elevation of . . .mind.” (Postscript) The reductive social reading’s bipolar distribution of good and evil is thoroughly confounded, and the alternate ending, in which the narrator’s persecutions continue, pushing him into madness, would have emphasized Williams’ own pathology.
     As the first-person narrative voice tells the tale in retrospect, the reader can never expect a Dickensian story of the eventual rise of a meritorious but poor lad. The curiosity that marks his advancement in education and skills also will lead him to investigate the forbidden chest, extract his employer’s confession, and lock them in mutually destructive struggle. The very real economic conflicts of the early Industrial Age are quite absent; instead, the story suggests the role of chance (called “fatal coincidence” in the Postscript) and a powerful psychological determinism.
     In the final pages of the book Caleb excoriates himself and excuses Falkland, thinking his employer has acted in the only way that he could given his life experience which led him early to dedicate himself to “the poison of chivalry.” The reader is invited to consider Caleb, too, as a victim of circumstance, operating blindly in a deterministic world where a person can only suffer and cannot control destiny.
     The book, as Godwin said in his 1832 preface to the Bentley’s edition, “has always been regarded by the public with an unusual degree of favour.” He conceived it, he says as a volume of “fictitious adventures, and wrote the last part first, elaborating Caleb’s repeated attempts to dodge his tormentor, never for long successful, a continuous “flight and pursuit.” And indeed the book makes a decent episodic suspense story as Williams finds the agents of his nemesis oppressing him at every turn. Taken realistically the narrative involves a wide variety of circumstances from the robber’s den with its unlikely leader to his short-lived idyll in Wales. The conclusion in which Falkland and Williams reconcile at the end of the novel betrays the laboriously constructed horror of the Gothic machinery. The original ending, too strong for the publisher’s opinion of the public, had had Williams descend into madness while imprisoned under the supervision of the tireless Gines (or “Jones”).  

     The book may have sold as a straightforward adventure story, but the hero’s persecution is so extreme that the plot sounds very like a projection of the imagination of a paranoid schizophrenic, and his suffering is primarily psychological. If Williams is paranoid, surely Falkland is grandiose. Both Falkland and Williams are obsessively enwrapped in each other, their relationship deeply neurotic, ambivalent, and in the end internecine. Their connection has been taken by some as homoerotic and much of what happens might be viewed as a dramatic representation of the trials of love. [3]
     The narrator’s mental suffering reaches such heights that it becomes a truly Existential theme. Like Beckford’s Vathek and Byronic heroes soon to come, Williams takes on the world and goes crashing down in glory if not in comfort. A large share of Williams’ pain arises from his isolation, as Falkland denies him the chance to have friends or even more casual human relationship. His isolation and his Job-like suffering lead him to cry out “Here I am, an outcast, destined to perish with hunger and cold. All men desert me. All men hate me. I am driven with mortal threats from the sources of comfort and existence. Accursed world . . .Why do I consent to live any longer?” (III, 7)
     Today Godwin’s philosophic anarchism plays little role in contemporary political discourse, and his name most commonly appears in accounts of Shelley and Byron detailing their involvement with his daughter Mary and his step-daughter Clair Clairmont. The reader of Things as They Are or Caleb Williams will find something unrelated to these issues, a readable, compelling story that reflects how everyone has felt, at one time or another, about a boss, a loved one, or life in this world.



1. The date was May 12, 1794. It is a pleasure to report that English juries freed all the defendants.

2. See most prominently his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness which was published the same year as Things as They Are.

3. See, for instance, Gold, Alex, Jr. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135–160.

“Monk” Lewis, Mr. Coleridge, and Popular Taste

     Matthew Lewis’ The Monk has been popular since its publication over two hundred years ago. A contemporary American may recognize the pleasure it yields as a “good read” and its secure place in the “Gothic novel” chapter of literary histories while feeling that the very qualities that make it enduringly popular bar it from what critics may regard as the more sublime higher reaches of Parnassus. Coleridge’s early review of the book [1] defines its strengths and weaknesses with considerable insight but his analysis is marred by his expressed distaste for the norms of popular art. Coleridge looks with condescension on characteristics that belong to popular art, failing to understand that reaffirming people’s received ideas is as great a part of literature as challenging them, and that the “cheap thrills” of the book are appropriate to its genre.
     Coleridge’s essay does open with a consideration of the book’s widespread appeal, noting that “the horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite. The same phaenomenon, therefore, which we hail as a favourable omen in the belles lettres of Germany, impresses a degree of gloom in the compositions of our countrymen.” One wonders whether this unabashed nationalism and condescension toward literary popularity can be unrelated to envy of the younger author’s higher sales.
     After all, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had explained his own role in his collaboration with Coleridge as the description of “incidents and situations from common life,” though he sought “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” In a clear division of labor, while his colleague sought to heighten the everyday, Coleridge took the opposite role of rendering believable “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic.” [2] Coleridge’s own use of the fantastic, the miraculous, the sensational and the exotic, not to mention his enthusiasm for German literature might have made Coleridge a likely natural advocate for Lewis, yet his review of The Monk is decidedly ambivalent, and Coleridge strays toward hostility on the very point at which his ideas are least supportable. [3]
     He suggests (with a rhetorical shudder of horror) that Lewis shows signs of being less than an orthodox Christian, based primarily on the novel’s passing ironic comments about the Bible’s tales of immorality. Coleridge is greatly concerned about this though, for some reason, he provides a reference to what strikes him as the dirtiest passage in scripture (Ezekiel XXIII). Probably the one line in the review that has attracted the greatest amount of attention is his claim that “the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale.” Coleridge doubtless had in mind not only the waggish comments on sexual themes in the Bible but also certain seduction scenes in the novel itself. Yet Monk’s jest about the Bible was flippant if daring and the author had, after all, consistently catered to British religious opinion in depicting Catholicism as superstitious and corrupt and foreign lands as realms of injustice and tyranny.
     In the first place, Coleridge is of course out of step with contemporary standards which would find neither the religious opinions nor the erotic scenes (more often implied than enacted) objectionable. Further, many readers would consider Coleridge himself far from averse to the use of an appeal to the sensational. The more significant problem with this stricture, however, is that it belies the popular character of Lewis work, and the book was immensely popular. It went through edition after edition, both authorized and pirated, and inspired stage and film adaptations as well as an opera. Almost apologetically, Coleridge says that he has only come to write about the book because of “the unusual success which it has experienced.”
     The reading audience, predominantly bourgeois and largely female, may have indeed been intrigued by the claims of Coleridge and the book’s other opponents. Lewis’ biographer drily notes that, the public had heard that The Monk was “horrible, blasphemous, and lewd, and they rushed to put their morality to the test.” [4] Indeed, criticism so abashed the author that he apologized to his family and his readers and expurgated later editions in a response to the opprobrium.
     While high art often interrogates and challenges received ideas, popular literature typically reinforces them. To be truly popular a work may flirt with transgression in a titillating manner, but it must ultimately strengthen rather than overturn the reader’s preconceptions. While it is true that the redoubtable Marquis de Sade (whose Justine may have influenced Lewis and who may have been influenced in turn) [5] wanted to think Lewis’ book “revolutionary,” but in fact the author’s subsequent disavowal of such an aim was no more than candid.
     Perhaps the most intensely erotic image in the entire book is the “daemon” conjured by Matilda: “It was a Youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked: A bright Star sparkled upon his forehead . . .” [6] Yet in spite of this clearly homoerotic image in a book full of cross-dressing and androgyny, the issue of homosexuality in lived experience never arises. This pattern is paradigmatic for The Monk as a whole. A sexy youth is a moment’s marvel. A joke about religion is only a joke. In the end, once the reader has relished scenes of women subjected to ravishment and naked appetite, the vicious suffer for their sins, Ambrosio most dramatically.
     The reader thinks about Lewis’ attitude in parliament and in private business toward slavery. While claiming an enlightened “modern” attitude and opposing slavery at home, the inheritor of sizable Indies plantations wished to maintain ownership of his own slaves. In the end, though more liberal than some, he took his position with the ruling class.
     Carnival thrill houses and horror films likewise must provide carefully regulated safe fear for people’s amusement in precisely the same way that sentimental stories like “tear-jerker” movies evoke strong but shallow levels of emotion. Lewis’ extravagant evocation of the supernatural as spectacle has a different character sixty years after the statute against witchcraft was repealed, when most educated people no longer believed in ghosts or sorcerers or raising the devil. Lewis may achieve Guignol-style shocks (such as Agnes holding the body of her baby), but he never rises to the true tragedy of Marlowe’s Faustus. Ambrosio, in contrast, can excite only curiosity and perhaps, from the soft-hearted, pity. He is a singularly weak diabolist, constantly wavering and acting more out of impulse than decided will.
     Ambrosio’s character strikes Coleridge as deeply implausible, and here he has a point. He finds the transition from a “man who had been described as possessing much general humanity, a keen and vigorous understanding, with habits of the most exalted piety” into “an uglier fiend than the gloomy imagination of Dante would have ventured to picture” altogether incredible. To Coleridge the monk’s character lacked a sufficient “semblance of truth . . . to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” [7] It is surely a fact that Ambrosio is a two-dimensional slave to the narrative, though this is generally the case in popular genres (and in folk stories where character depth is nonexistent).
     The enjoyment of naughty stories that conclude with the most conventional of morals extends from the account of hot times in Sodom in the medieval Pearl-poet’s Clannesse through Moll Flanders and Reefer Madness. Coleridge faults this technique, claiming that Lewis has gone too far. “The sufferings which he describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them.” Such righteous indignation only flare the higher if the indignant reader is aware of his own participation in sado-masochistic pleasure.
     Coleridge says that in a book like The Monk “the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it . . . For the same reasons a romance is incapable of exemplifying a moral truth.” He might more generally have said that a romanced cannot support a theme implying something about lived experience, as it need not coincide even with a single person’s impression of reality. With the inclusion of supernatural cause and effect, “all events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed wherever the author's purposes demand it.” This allows a certain irresponsibility for which the compensating value must be neither more nor less that its “having given pleasure during its perusal,” what moderns might call a beach or an airplane book. With the same envious condescension a professor might use in ridiculing Stephen King, he comments on the cheapness of the Gothic: “the public will learn . . . with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured.” “Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste.
     Vulgar it may be in the literal sense, but, as Seldes said, outstanding popular art is far preferable to mediocre high art. Though Coleridge conceded that Lewis displayed “an imagination rich, powerful, and fervid,”(and that last adjective suggests pathological excess), he failed to understand the role of popular literature. People have always demanded such work, filled with sensation as contemporary popular movies are filled with cars crashing through windows and glimpses of naked breasts. Such pandering does indeed correspond to themes that reinforce rather than challenge the reader’s ideas, but this, too, is an important role of art. Popular art like Lewis’ The Monk transmit culture no less than oral folk-tales in preliterate societies. Though powerful art always contains ambivalences, mysteries, and contradictions, such cues suggesting a critical attitude toward what “all the world” thinks have only recently come to the fore in the narratives people have always invented to occupy their leisure. The Monk is indeed unrealistic and sensational; these are appropriate generic characteristics. It titillates readers into thinking it transgressive while in fact reinforcing their pre-existing opinions.



1. Coleridge, review of Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk, The Critical Review, Feb. 1797, pp.. 194-200. Oddly Coleridge in this review refers to the main character as Antonio, not Ambrosio. Subsequent references to this same review will not be separately noted.

2. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.

3. There is little doubt that Wordsworth would have shared Coleridge’s opinion of The Monk. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he frames his project in direct opposition to what he considers the coarsening of taste which he attributes to urbanization and which has resulted in a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” He would surely have considered Monk one of those writers have supplied the public’s desire through the “application of gross and violent stimulants.”

4. Peck, Louis (1961). A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 28.

5. Horner, Avril. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 39 ff.

6. Chapter 7.

7. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XIV.