Abstract
Northanger Abbey opens by positing two kinds of readers and two kinds of texts: the naive readers of romance who would expect a heroine to be an orphan and to engage in ‘the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rosebush’ (13); and the more sophisticated readers who reject romance and who know a parody when they see one. Readers of the first type will find that this work disorients or disrupts their expectations, but the second type can apparently enter a comfortable world of shared beliefs.1 In Northanger Abbey itself, however, Austen does more than invite her reader to join in a collaborative effort to debunk the conventions of sentimental novels, more even than to witness the emergence of a new kind of novel based on probabilities and psychological realism.2 She mocks and undermines her own chosen method — parodic discourse — so that both narrative and reader are kept off-balance. In working towards her own conception of what constitutes novelistic discourse, Austen makes the reader a participant, now perhaps colluding with, now perhaps resisting the narrator’s evaluation of her own novel.
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Notes
See, for example, Karl Kroeber, who argues that there is agreement between Austen and her readers ‘as to the proper attitudes of novelist and reader toward fictional subjects’ (Styles in Fictional Structure: The Art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971] 44–5.
Several critics have commented on how Northanger Abbey is an important turning point for both Jane Austen and the English novel. See, for example, Stuart M. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 69: ‘Expectations have been revised, turned from the strangeness of surprise to the understanding of probabilities’; George Levine, ‘Translating the Monstrous: Northanger Abbey’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (December 1975): ‘[the novel] sets out for us starkly the contradictions latent in moving from parody to novel’ (337); Lloyd W. Brown, Bits of Ivory: Narrative Technique in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973): ‘the evolution of Catherine’s moral psychology coincides with the strategy of ironic anticlimax which informs the novel’s parodic form’ (217). Northanger Abbey therefore illustrates M.M. Bakhtin’s thesis that ‘the most important novelistic models and novel-types arose precisely during [the) parodic destruction of preceding novelistic worlds’ (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holauist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 309).
Joseph Wiesenfarth, The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen’s Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967) 15; Katrin Ristkok Burlin, ‘The Pen of the Contriver: The Four Fictions of Northanger Abbey’, Jane Austen Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 105. See also Lloyd Brown: ‘he is the parodist who mimics Catherine’s language… and intellectual values in order to demonstrate their limitations vis-à-vis the complexities of experience’ (175); and Susan Morgan, in the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): ‘Henry’s delight in words and their precise use and misuse is the most important way he communicates his sense of the variety and subtlety of the familiar world’ (58).
Howard S. Babb, in Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue (Columbus: Ohio State Univeristy Press, 1962), provides a close analysis of this passage. His view that this dialogue is a way for Henry ‘to make known his affection for Catherine’ (111) is not necessarily at odds with my own reading. However, Henry’s intent does not in itself ennoble his discourse, which is here both manipulative and artificial.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ Image/Music/Text, transl. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977) 147.
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© 1995 Tara Ghoshal Wallace
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Wallace, T.G. (1995). Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody. In: Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372948_2
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