University of California Press Nineteenth-Century Literature

Northanger Abbey; Or, Nature and Probability
Author(s): Mark Loveridge

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jun., 1991), pp. 1-29
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3044961
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Northanger Abbey; or,
Nature and Probability
MARK LOVERIDGE
to7WOULD like to explore the possibility that

Northanger Abbey is organized around a
central motif or debate akin to those signaled by the linked terms
in the titles Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. In North-
anger Abbey the abstract nouns-Nature and Probability, asso-
ciated respectively with Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney-
do not share the richness of ethical and psychological suggestion
of the terms in the other novels. Instead they are, as might be
expected in so overtly literary a work, technical terms from the
discourse of eighteenth-century criticism. The drama between
them helps to create the novel's unique atmosphere, that puz-
zling but distinctive combination of novelistic force with teasing
and dismissive irony. The terms remain unannounced in both
title and text, because (like any good Gothic novelist) Jane Aus-
ten does not wish to display the central mystery of her work on
its surface.
A discussion of this aspect of the novel may help in two ways
in a reassessment of its merits. First, it will enable those structural
features that criticism generally takes to be flaws (for example,
the apparently implausible change between Catherine at Bath-
matter-of-fact, docile, appealing, and relatively unimaginative-
and at Northanger, where she is suddenly overimaginative and
absurd) to emerge as integral and amusing characteristics. At
the same time, the rationale behind the curious shifts of tone
will become clearer. And second, it will shed light on the im-
C 1991 by The Regents of the University of California
2 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE
portant question of the quality of historical awareness, or his-
torical sophistication, that the novel displays. This quality is im-
portant, because estimates of Northanger Abbey's status depend
quite markedly on the extent to which the reader is willing to
credit it with the power to reflect a historical background, be-
yond its surface interests in Gothic novels and their contem-
porary readers. Without some such further context the novel
must, it seems, remain a lightweight production, merely a de-
lightful work of transition between Austen's juvenilia and her
mature novels. But Northanger Abbey has recently come to be rec-
ognized as a transitional work in a much wider sense: as a work
highly suggestive of changes in novelistic technique that were
taking place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
To one school of thought it is a forward-pointing novel, achiev-
ing a "third term," a new and original reconciliation of the con-
temporary modes of Gothic fiction and anti-Jacobin burlesque
of emotionalism. Heroic Gothic energies undergo "translation"
into "another language."' The achievement is "not to make ro-
mance ridiculous but to make common anxiety 'serious' or
'high',"2 so that by the time of Catherine's ride home to Fullerton
the narrative is trembling "on the verge of becoming a psycho-
logical novel,"3 something even a Bronte might admire. Perhaps,
in the end, Austen is unsure of what she has achieved (why does
she tease the reader and break the illusion so thoroughly at the
end? Nerves, perhaps, or a juvenile need to show off and to re-
mind the reader of her comic control), but at least one may argue
for significance in the novel, even if this is at the expense of any
real emphasis on its comic and burlesque aspects.
Another approach emphasizes the qualities that Northanger
Abbey shares with earlier kinds of fiction from which it is in
transit. The most convincing of such treatments is Eric Roth-
stein's description of it as an eighteenth-century "novel of ideas"
displaying patterns of analogical control reminiscent of mid-
'George Levine, "Translating the Monstrous: NorthangerAbbey," Nineteenth-Century

Fiction, 30 (1975), 347.
2Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1980), p. 126.
3Frank J. Kearful, "Satire and the Form of the Novel: The Problem of Aesthetic
Unity in Northanger Abbey," ELH, 32 (1965), 525.
NOR THANGER ABBEY 3
century fiction such as Fielding's.4 Rothstein's is unique among
recent accounts in being wholly sure of the novel's structural and
aesthetic unity, while yet relishing "its controlled restlessness of
narrative modes" (p. 27), a quality that distresses those critics,
such as James Thompson, who assume it to be a Victorian novel
manque, spoiled by its author being "most unsure of her narrative
control."5
For the majority of readers, then, history in this instance
means primarily literary history. But a third approach senses an
intriguing relationship between the novel and its social and his-
torical contexts, a relationship that enriches the text while re-
maining something of an enigma. Why is it, for instance, that
General Tilney should be provided with a fuller and more varied
background in the life of the times, "a more detailed and more
specific persona than any other character in all the six novels"?6
At Bath he is only a remote, somewhat stilted father figure: in
the ending he will be only a sub-Gothic figurine, expelling Cath-
erine from Northanger for her final ride home. Yet in forty
pages in the middle of volume II he is kitted out with a per-
plexing variety of roles: his relationships with his family, present
and past, are developed; he stays up late at night to brood on
the affairs of the nation, and to read (or write) pamphlets; he
reorganizes the domestic offices, going so far as to invent new
kitchen implements. In his tremendous kitchen-garden he en-
thusiastically cultivates huge quantities of fruit and vegetables,
exhibiting here as elsewhere a domesticated and plausible blend
of military ingenuity and entrepreneurial instinct. Clearly he is
a man who will one day build a better mousetrap and be elevated
to a trade peerage. He briefly anticipates everything that the au-
thoritarian father figure of eighteenth-century novels might be-
come in the real world of the next century, but to what end?
Why should Austen perform this conjuring trick with a minor
character, without making some further use of it?
4See "The Lessons of Northanger Abbey," University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1974),

14-30.
5Between Self and World: The Novels ofJane Austen (University Park: Pennsylvania
State Univ. Press, 1988), p. 51.
6B. C. Southam, "General Tilney's Hot-Houses: Some RecentJane Austen Studies
and Texts," Ariel, 2, No. 4 (1971), 60.
Equally, how can Henry Tilney speak sojocularly about riots
in London, as he gives his histrionic account of the pictures sup-
posedly being created in his sister's fevered imagination by Cath-
erine's news of "something very shocking indeed"7 to be ex-
pected from the metropolis?:
a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields; the

Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing
with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the hopes of
the nation,) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and
the gallant Capt. Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the
head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper
window. (p. 113)
He is allowed to speak as though this vision were simply the sup-

posed product of a deranged imagination, and his highly de-
tached irony is not undercut: the girls are abashed. But his words
reflect very exactly the pre-Peterloo tensions of the period in late
1816 and early 1817 when Jane Austen was revising her manu-
script for publication. Evidence of a revolutionary plot to attack
the Bank and the Tower was presented to secret Parliamentary
committees by the cabinet early in 1817: on 15 November 1816
a great revolutionary mass meeting had been held, not in St.
George's Fields (the scene of the Gordon riots in 1780), but in
Spa Fields; here also the Bank and the Tower were threatened,
and a troop of cavalry was dispatched from Woolwich in case of
need. On 31 October the London Times reported that a Major
Thackwell of the 73rd Foot had been "knocked off his horse by
a large stone" in the course of a riot in Birmingham.8 Henry's
7"Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion," vol. 5 of The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W.
Chapman (2d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 112. Subsequent page numbers
refer to this edition.
8The Times (London), 31 October 1816, p. 2, cols. 2 and 4. Major Thackwell "com-
manded" the 73rd, as Capt. Tilney does his "troop." In the second column of p. 3
of this edition appears a report concerning the court-martial of a Lieutenant Rob-
ertson: the prosecuting officer is one Colonel Morland. General Tilney's vast kitchen-
garden and hot-houses also bear some relation to contemporary social conditions.
The London riots were caused, in part, by a food shortage that had led to high bread
prices: London bakers could avert looting by advertising cheap bread in front of
their shops. At the end of November the Times, in one of its "State of the Nation"
columns (30 November, p. 2, col. 4), opined that "the whole deficiency" could be
made up if "the waste but too common in our domestic habits" were corrected by
NOR THANGER ABBEY 5
reference to the cavalry being sent from Northampton is in-
tended as another inanity (it would take a messenger with news
of a London riot at least two days to return with troops), but the
Luddite disturbances in Nottinghamshire and other parts of the
Midlands were still, in late 1816, requiring troops to be sent from
local garrisons such as the one at Wolverhampton. And these
tensions in turn recall the fevered atmosphere of the 1790s,
when the story was first written.
Dramatically and emotionally Henry's lines are quite
straightforward, yet at the same time they are pregnant with in-
congruity. The intellectual confidence of the Enlightenment
briefly evokes and then casually dismisses the revolutionary
world that has already, in 1817, destroyed that confidence. So
the content of the novel again suggests, in a characteristically
elliptical and enigmatic fashion, the disjunctions between his-
torical periods that are suggested by its form and method. The
narrative again becomes, like Catherine herself, a slightly un-
stable mixture of the natural and the absurd; or, to use a dif-
ferent vocabulary, of the probable and the improbable. At the
same time, the novel's relationship with its social background
begins to mirror its relationship with its literary context. It seems
that some hidden principle is at work, harmonizing different
aspects of the writing, and drawing the novel subtly into
coherence.
Henry and Catherine are very different people, yet they will
marry. Catherine is natural, unheroical: she is associated with
the natural in several senses. Rolling down green slopes; playing
cricket and baseball; "natural folly," sheer ignorance and sim-
plicity (or, from Henry's viewpoint, "natural taste") (p. 1 1 1); the
"private exertion" and "proper economy." A "system of cultivating parochial farms,

or large gardens" was proposed as the remedy (Austen seems to echo "parochial"
in Catherine's striking reflection that "a whole parish [seemed] to be at work" [p.
178] in the Tilney gardens). But the General's horticultural heroics merely parody
this system: rather than producing staple crops, he is devoted to "most valuable
fruits," the only one of which we hear being that exotic rarity, the pineapple (he has
a "pinery" [p. 178] in which he grows, in a poor year, one hundred specimens).
It is perhaps misleading of Warren Roberts to assert that the historical at-
tributes of riots in London, and of spies, belong only to the revolutionary atmosphere
of the 1790s (see Jane Austen and the French Revolution [London: Macmillan, 1979],
pp. 24-30).
sentimental positive of good nature, the affectionate heart. At
first she seems more of a species than an individual: general,
unimproved, female Nature.
Where Catherine is natural, Henry is sophisticated. In some
ways like his narrator, witty, casual, teasing, perceptive, and iron-
ical, he also has his own, rather unnerving, analytical attitude to
the world, to Catherine, and to the idea of character. He sees
through the social surface of Bath as he mimics its rituals for
Catherine; and he claims to see so far into Catherine as to make
her a little wary of him. In particular, he is fond of the practice
and the vocabulary of probable inference. His habit is to estab-
lish how people will probably talk and respond, by considering
their dispositions and estimating the conditioning influence of
their environment and "probable habits of life" (p. 132). A Mrs.
Allen will be pleased to talk about muslins; a Catherine will enjoy
being conspiratorially teased and flattered with the implication
that she is above the artificial life around her. Or at least she
would, if she knew "whether she might venture to laugh" (p. 26)
when so addressed, or could do without a strong hint dropped
at the close that teasing was what that was. Henry has, at his first
guess, underestimated the difference between the two of them,
and the extent of Catherine's ingenuousness.
It may at first seem unlikely that the natural and the prob-
able could be terms capable of being thrown together in any
dramatic relationship. In one sense they are virtually synonyms,
the sense to which Anne Ehrenpreis appeals when she quotes,
in the introduction to her edition of Northanger Abbey, Jane Aus-
ten's estimate of Mary Brunton's novel Self-Control as "an
excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of
Nature or Probability in it. I declare I do not know whether
Laura's passage down the American River, is not the most nat-
ural, possible, everyday thing she ever does."9
The second sentence shows that Austen has most clearly in
mind the meaning of "probable" with which modern readers are
9Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 1 1 October 1813, in Jane Austen's Letters to Her
Sister Cassandra and Others, 2d ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1979), p. 344. Quoted in Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1972), p. 7.
NOR THANGER ABBEY 7
familiar: "vraisemblance," truth to life, naturalness, and the
techniques of literary illusion that produce these effects. This is
the sense of the word with which Catherine can be directly iden-
tified, the "simple and probable" (p. 53). But at the end of the
eighteenth century "probability" is a much more resonant word
than this.
Probability is originally a classical Greek concept, associated
with rhetoric and used to indicate the quality that adheres to
phenomena or reports when they are believable: something of
which we can be convinced, and to which we can give assent. In
medieval and Renaissance Europe it has a very wide history of
use, in fields that include theology, natural and moral philoso-
phy, law, and mathematics. And in the context of all of these
different usages, it becomes a term of the literary criticism of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.'0
In its eighteenth-century application to literature proba-
bility has two quite different meanings. First there is the "Cath-
erine" sense of naturalness, or a direct and sustained reference
to the real or actual world. Then there is a meaning in which
the term is applied to the structure and tone of literary works,
to their internal self-consistency or homogeneity of tone. The
argument is that if all the elements of a work are consistent and
harmonious, the reading mind will be drawn to credit or give
assent to the illusion in almost the same way as it would if the
work were realistic. So science fiction-or, more to the point, a
Gothic novel-may be "probable" if it provides a consistent al-
ternative world, one made plausible by the inclusion of a satis-
fying amount of detail. The plausibility of this alternative world
leads the mind to make an analogy between literary and real
worlds, rather than crediting the illusion directly. Hence the ap-
peal to nature is partly superseded. Shakespeare may be "the
poet of nature"' even though he portrays impossible, super-
natural beings, because his style is natural and probable. One
'0This paragraph and the following are indebted to Douglas Lane Patey's account
of the emergence of probabilism in Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory
and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).
"Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," Works of SamuelJohnson, ed. Arthur
Sherbo (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), VII, 62.
may say, as Dr. Johnson says of Paradise Lost, that "the probable
therefore is marvellous, and the marvellous is probable." 12
However, the most important aspect of this internal self-
consistency for eighteenth-century criticism is not that it permits
analogy, but that it allows-even demands-Henry's mode of
thought, probable inference. The reading mind must be led to
make an inference from the narrative-the "fable"-to the
moral that that fable is designed to reveal (Austen reminds her
readers that novels and fables share interests, in her discreet ref-
erence in the first chapter to John Gay's fable of "The Hare and
Many Friends").'3 A primary function of Augustan literature is
to teach, to reveal moral truths persuasively. The moral is the
"truth" at the end of a fable; to be persuasive, it must have been
reached in such a way as to permit or incite the mind to assent
to it: the fable must conduce to the moral. If the fable is relevant
and probable (decorous, self-consistent, and detailed), the mind
is led naturally toward the intended moral, accepting it as the
product of the delightful fable, and hence itself delightful. An
1823 reviewer of Robert Paltock's 1751 novel The Life and Ad-
ventures of Peter Wilkins writes: "We require nothing but good
sense and good morals, exhibited in a succession of events, flow-
ing from natural causes and arriving at a probable conclusion."'14
So probability carries an association with moral force. It
forms a literary equivalent of the great Augustan moral quality
of prudence, "prudentia," the worldly virtue of knowing how to
control your own destiny through an understanding of the prin-
ciples of cause-and-effect as they operate in the social and moral
spheres. Understand the world, act well and consistently in the
light of that understanding, and you will come to a good end.
Read a good book, respond to the consistency of its parts, and
you will accept its moral, its good ending.
This is all very well, and very hopeful. However, it does in
practice mean that "an excellently-meant, elegantly-written
12Samuel Johnson, "Life of Milton," Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck
Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), I, 174.
'3John Gay, "The Hare and Many Friends," Fables (London, 1727; rpt. Menston,
Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1969), I, 170-73.
"4Unsigned review, Retrospective Review (no month, 1823), vii, 131-35. Paltock's
highly probable fantasy was sometimes known as Peter Wilkins and the Flying Indians.
NOR THANGER ABBEY 9
Work" such as Self-Control (or The Italian, the favorite horrid
reading of Catherine and Isabella) may be understood to be
"probable" if it is both consistently elegant and points a moral.
The Italian would conform on both counts, being written
throughout in the composed, sonorous manner of high ro-
mance, and possessing a moral that is wholly acceptable in terms
of the critical framework outlined above. This moral is precisely
that the individual mind must know itself and respond to the
world in a stable fashion before it can hope to understand and
come to terms with the phenomena around it. In one of the
closing chapters the villainous Schedoni reproves Vivaldi (our
hero) for the "ardour" of his youthful imagination, which has
soared "after new wonders into a world of its own!" Vivaldi
blushes, just as Catherine will blush when rebuked by Henry for
her enthusiastic fantasies. Vivaldi is "surprised that Schedoni
should so well have understood the nature of his mind, while
he himself, with whom conjecture had never assumed the sta-
bility of opinion ... had been ignorant even of its propensities." 15
Clearly, if a novel can be both "probable" and elegantly ar-
tificial throughout, while at the same time "probable" may also
mean "natural," the critical model that controls the terms will
soon be suffering from irreconcilable tensions. After 1780 this
is indeed the case, and in Northanger Abbey such tensions are
made manifest in a comic form. "Probability" means internal
self-consistency, a decorum of parts and tone: but if it also has
to answer or reflect both the Catherine-sense of naturalness and
the Henry-sense of analytical probable inference with moral
overtones, then self-consistency must clearly find itself in the po-
sition of a piggy-in-the-middle between two extremes. And if the
boundaries between what is absurd (unnatural, elegantly arti-
ficial) and what is natural become blurred, then equally, what is
natural and what is improbable may be happily confused. Mar-
garet Oliphant, in her enthusiastic account of Northanger Abbey
in 1886, spends a page praising the drawing of Catherine's char-
acter ("perhaps the most captivating picture of a very young girl
which fiction has ever furnished") and then goes on to say, in
15Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents; A Romance,
ed. Frederick Garber (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 398.
equally approving tones, that "the machinery of the story is won-
derfully bad."' 6 This captures very well the subtle combination
of the natural or realistic and the absurd or burlesque, which is
such a striking feature of the novel. Passages that seem to be
credible accounts of intense experiences when read casually turn
into arch parodies when considered analytically.'7 Scenes that
feel quite natural become surreptitious burlesques of Gothic-
romantic incidents, as in Catherine's "abduction" in the
Thorpes's carriage in volume I, chapter 11; or Henry's appar-
ently fanciful and absurd account of her room in the Abbey
turns out to have included precise descriptions of some of the
furniture. What is burlesque or ridiculous may also be emo-
tionally valid; what is natural may also be absurd, and vice versa.
So probability, instead of remaining simply an agent for stability
and coherence in the method of the novel, is drawn in to play
a part in the comedy and the drama.
EQ~D
Probability is often on Henry's lips in vol-

ume I, but it is at the start of volume II that the debate between
the two central terms emerges fully into the relationship between
himself and Catherine. In the first chapter Henry goes so far as
to point out to Catherine the nature of the difference between
them, using the language of probabilism in his characterization
of himself. He is talking to her about her definition of his brother
Frederick as "good-natured," a quality Frederick has, as Cath-
erine thinks, displayed in his willingness to dance with Isabella
even though he "hated" dancing. In reply to her charitable re-
mark, Henry launches into his theme:
Henry smiled, and said, "How very little trouble it can give you
to understand the motive of other people's actions."
'6The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the
Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1886), III, 190-91.
17See Jan Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel (London: Macmillan, 1983),
p. 33: "Examined apart, each sentence is full of irony at Catherine's hackneyed fears
and conjectures or at the language which conveys them.... Yet on the whole the
passage makes the reader feel for and with Catherine rather than distanced from
her." Fergus is writing about the episode in Catherine's room (volume II, chapter
6).
NORTHANGER ABBEY 11
"Why?-What do you mean?"
"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 feel-
ings, age, situation, and probable habits of life considered?-but, how
should I be influenced, what would be my inducement in acting so and
so?" (p. 132)
Catherine is confused and a little frightened by this, and no won-

der. It sounds as though Henry is accusing her of self-
centeredness, invoking the moral aspect of probability and say-
ing, in effect, "You should learn to control or anticipate the
world, through observation and through trying to understand
what induces you to act as you do. Learn to be excursive, ana-
lytical: control your own destiny by learning about other people."
But it is hard to be sure of his tone. He is made to sound critical
and sardonic; yet he is not merely carping, but also trying to
compliment Catherine, to commend her to herself. The diffi-
culty arises because he has not had the grace to articulate the
premise of Catherine's (as opposed to Frederick's) good nature,
on which his comments seem to depend; and Catherine, true to
form, is quite unable to infer any such premise for herself. So
the motive of Henry's speech about motives remains obscure to
her. Neither is Henry's ellipsis made clear to the reader, because
Austen's technique is itself elliptical. Placing us as far as possible
in Catherine's position, she makes no comment on Henry's con-
fusion of tones and meanings. Indeed, she makes sure that he
compounds the confusion, by having him refer to Catherine's
possibly ingenuous remark that she "cannot speak well enough
to be unintelligible" as "an excellent satire on modern language"
(p. 133). This riposte would credit Catherine with precisely the
kind of analytical alertness of which his previous remarks have
just dispossessed her: so that whereas his apparent criticism con-
tained a hidden compliment, his overt compliment is, with agree-
able neatness, made to contain a hidden sarcasm.
Given the apparent form of Northanger Abbey as an educa-
tional journey for Catherine, Henry's expression of his critical
viewpoint must carry some force, must disturb us as well as her.
Yet at the climax of the drama between them Henry will come
to see not only that her strange good nature is worth compli-
menting, but that there are limits to his own view of the world,
limits to probabilism. He will allow Catherine to win the debate-
or at least, he will allow that she possesses qualities that he ad-
mires, and he will apologize for himself.
This is of considerable significance. As Douglas Lane Patey
says, the eighteenth-century novel, "usually cast in the form of
an educational journey, frequently takes as its explicit subject the
conditions of knowledge and learning, the need for the culti-
vation of probable inference" (Probability and Literary Form, p.
176). Probable inference can, after all, tell a heroine that if she
pursues her ends prudently, virtue will, more often than not, be
rewarded. But Catherine's rewards, uniquely, are to derive from
her positive lack of prudential awareness. If Northanger Abbey is
about the limits of moral and technical probabilism, and about
its potential for absurdity, then it is also an active critique of some
of the most important grounds of belief of one kind of conven-
tional eighteenth-century criticism and fiction.
Jane Austen is, it seems, anxious to articulate very precisely
her awareness of the wide literary context in which she is work-
ing, a context that extends well beyond the Gothic romance. We
know that her wish in her mature novels is to progress away from
burlesque toward the creation of more faithful copies of nature;
to write narratives that rely more directly on the illusions fos-
tered by the techniques of probability and naturalism. But if oth-
ers have hijacked probability to the cause of providing the poetic
rewards for those pictures of perfection that made Jane Austen
feel so sick and wicked, then clearly she needs to cleanse and
decontaminate the term of its unwanted associations, as she does
here through dramatic comedy and burlesque.
Henry may not, in his reaction to Catherine's estimate of
Frederick's character, have managed to express himself well, but
he has put his finger on Catherine's peculiarity. Not only is she
simple and natural, she is wholly unprobable in the prudential
sense. She is unable adequately to foresee consequences, to infer
or predict character and event from evidence, or, at Northanger,
to retrodict, to infer a past sequence of events or plot. Even her
weather forecasting is done with reference to her own internal
hopes and mood, rather than with any more prudent reliance
on meteorology: "a very sober looking morning; the sun making
NORTHANGER ABBEY 13
only a few efforts to appear; and Catherine augured from it,
every thing most favourable to her wishes" (p. 82).
Seen in an uncomplimentary light, Catherine's capacity for
reading even the weather in terms of her own desires would be
no more than an adolescent self-centeredness born of naivete
and excitement. What takes it beyond this is the precision of the
verb "augured." This word, with its gently occult overtones, re-
veals Catherine's real strangeness, even exoticism, in the prob-
abilistic world in which Henry lives. Her difference from him is
so profound as to make it quite plausible that he can elevate this
tendency in her to the level of a principle, the "innate principle
of general integrity" by which her mind is, he will say (again
admiring through irony), "warped" (p. 219). Such a tempera-
ment would not survive, could not live with, the ability to predict
or infer the nature and probable actions of an Isabella or a John
Thorpe from their behavior and qualities. Here, to know all
would be to beware of all, not to forgive all. Henry might have
tried to teach Catherine prudence, but he can see that prospects
would be dim, and chooses other lessons for her.
A full resolution between the protagonists looks most un-
likely at first. Indeed, in volume I, chapter 14, Henry has only
been prevented from possibly defining Catherine's "natural"
qualities as simplicity or stupidity by Austen's nobly throwing
herself in the way and reserving the association to herself, in a
preemptive strike. She lectures us on the blessings of "imbecility
in females," the "advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl."
Then Henry lectures a beautiful and ignorant girl (Catherine)
on the subject of painting, and "his instructions were so clear
that she soon began to see beauty in every thing admired by him,
and her attention was so earnest, that he became perfectly sat-
isfied of her having a great deal of natural taste" (p. 11 1).
"Natural taste," although clearly designed to echo the earlier
phrase, is at a discreet and subtle distance from "natural folly."
It is most fortunate for Catherine that what the author may see
as stupidity, the hero can register as refinement. Henry here
takes on himself the role of an authority, one who is possessed
of the accepted and fashionable doctrines of the picturesque. In
so doing, he displays kinship with several other characters in the
novel who claim to be authorities on particular subjects and are
believed by their audience. John Thorpe claims to be an au-
thority on Catherine's financial prospects and is believed by Gen-
eral Tilney. Catherine claims, inadvertently, to be an authority
on London after her lecture from Henry, and is believed by
Eleanor. Isabella says that she has been reading dozens of Gothic
novels; Catherine believes her. Henry claims to be an authority
on muslins, and is believed by Mrs. Allen: a whole gallery of
natural credulousness in the face of bogus authority.
One might think that in claiming authoritative knowledge,
Henry is leaving probability in favor of certainty. However there
is one ironical sense in which he is not. A meaning of probability
widely current through the Renaissance is "worthy of appro-
bation and approval," and also, by way of the related term "plau-
sibility," "worthy of applause." Essentially this means that one
believes what one admires, especially when the information is
delivered with or from authority. Again, Austen has already
made a preemptive strike on this association. As early as the sec-
ond chapter she took care to create an ironical link between
probability and authority, in particular between the probable
and the expectations that might arise from the authority of
genre, the stereotypes of the Gothic romance. The pseudo-
authoritative word "must," used of Mrs. Morland's role in the
plot to follow ("advice of the most important and applicable na-
ture must of course flow from her wise lips") is allowed to mod-
ulate directly into an equally ludicrous use of the word "prob-
able," used of Mrs. Allen: "she will, probably, contribute to
reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of
which a last volume is capable" (p. 20).
In its original sense, probability is closely tied to the idea of
authority, or authoritative testimony. A clergyman who held ac-
cepted or acceptable views would be referred to as a "probable
Doctor"' 8 of the Church. Henry is a "clergyman" (p. 30) and
claims authoritative knowledge, albeit of secular matters such as
the picturesque. No doubt he would like to think that Catherine
accepts and believes his lecture, but Austen sees to it that the
'8Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or, The Rule of Conscience (4th ed., London:
Luke Meredith, 1696), p. 113.
NOR THANGER ABBEY 15
distinction between belief and admiration becomes as charm-
ingly blurred as that between "folly" and "taste" a few pages ear-
lier: "It was no effort to Catherine to believe that Henry Tilney
could never be wrong. His manner might sometimes surprize,
but his meaning must always bejust:-and what she did not un-
derstand, she was almost as ready to admire, as what she did"
(p. 114). Here the authorial pose of authority, the mock claim
for the authority of the Gothic-sentimental, is transposed into
the drama between the characters; a Henry Tilney must be right,
because he is "probable," authoritative. Play with form has mod-
ulated into dramatic relationship.
It may be natural to want to lecture others-everyone needs
to be admired-but lecturing is a suspect activity throughout
Northanger Abbey. Even Jane Austen's own lecture to the reader
(in volume I, chapter 5) on the merits of novels has the same air
of duplicity, of seeing something in two different ways at once,
as is found in the rest of the text. In order to provide a contrast
with laudable novels, Austen goes so far as to charge a form of
literature with the crime of presenting "unnatural characters"
and "improbable circumstances" (p. 38). Given the nature of the
mockery in earlier chapters, one might reasonably have ex-
pected this form to be the Gothic novel. But as usual, the reader's
probable conjectures are to count for little.
Most of this fifth chapter consists of direct, magisterial
praise of tasteful, witty novels of genius by such authors as Fanny
Burney and Maria Edgeworth. This is accompanied by a picture
of the unnecessarily bashful female reader who would, so we are
told, be prouder to be found reading a volume of the Spectator
than a mere novel. Jane Austen affirms that this august and re-
spectable publication will "disgust a young person of taste," that
it consists of "the statement of improbable circumstances, un-
natural characters, and topics of conversation," and that its lan-
guage is "coarse" (p. 38). Spoken with the authority of the author
of a novel, which we, as its readers, are virtually forced to accept,
this sounds strangely plausible. Yet considered analytically it is
as purely perverse a judgment as could be given, especially if
one considers a verdict such as that of Samuel Johnson, himself
one of Austen's favorite writers. Johnson says this of Addison:
"His prose is the model of the middle style ... pure without
scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always
equable and always easy . .. Whoever wishes to attain an English
style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."'9
As so often in Northanger Abbey, the chapter is made to read
naturally and plausibly, yet is quite absurd. The effect is com-
pounded by the prose style in which the judgment is delivered:
poised syntax, lengthy sentences held lightly together with co-
lons and semicolons; all deliberately reminiscent of the style of
the Spectator. As is later to be the case with the Gothic, the ap-
parent annihilation of a species of literature has been turned
effortlessly into something closer to admiring but paradoxical
imitation.
So Henry is not wrong to lecture Catherine as he does.
Given the ambience provided by authorial lecturing and by the
assertiveness of the other characters, it is natural that he should
lecture her, though the results are bound to be bizarre. But by
volume II, chapter 4, he is coming much closer to being wrong,
on the subject of the relations between Isabella, James, and Fred-
erick. Catherine has begun to worry over the developing friend-
ship between Isabella and Frederick, which seems to her to
threaten her brother's engagement to Isabella. Henry at first re-
fuses to pass an opinion, saying that he would only be guessing
at the state of Frederick's heart on this occasion: probable rea-
soning will not work. Catherine presses, Henry remains reticent.
Finally her anxiety forces this from him: "You have no doubt of
the mutual attachment of your brother and your friend; depend
upon it therefore, that real jealousy can never exist between
them.... Their hearts are open to each other, as neither heart
can be to you" (p. 152).
He is unable to resist comforting Catherine, taking, as he
did three chapters earlier, her good nature as part of his prem-
ise. His sentimental tableau of mutual affection is calculated to
strike a chord in her nature, and hence to convince. The un-
spoken assumption behind this is that Catherine is a conven-
tional girl, that because she is good-natured she will probably
respond to a sentimental vision of relationships. Catherine
'9Samuel Johnson, "Life of Addison," Lives of the English Poets, II, 149-50.
promptly proves that she is not good-natured in this merely con-
ventional sense, by remaining unconvinced until Henry reverts
to character and makes a confident prediction: that Frederick
will return to his regiment, and his acquaintance with Isabella
lapse. At this Catherine yields: "Henry Tilney must know best"
(p. 153). This is delightful, because what Henry initially tried to
say in response to her anxiety was, in effect, "this time I don't
know: human nature is sometimes odd and perplexing. But I'm
sure you know best, and that events will match your character
and your natural expectations of the best." But Catherine re-
mains dubious until Henry returns to himself and again becomes
probable in his authoritative predictions, predictions that will
soon be seen to be wide of the mark.
Henry's motives and emotions in this exchange remain
rather enigmatic, beyond his desire to reassure Catherine. Is his
reluctance to speak on the subject of his brother and Isabella as
genuine and proper as it seems, or is he so embarrassed (with
"the embarrassment of real sensibility" [p. 241] such as he is to
betray at Fullerton) at his brother's behavior as to be unable to
face the nervous Catherine with his real opinion? We are given
no narrative clues. There was, though, a comparable situation
two chapters earlier, in the lack of clear clues for Catherine and
ourselves, as to the reason for Eleanor's "embarrassed manner"
(p. 139) when she is trying to invite Catherine to Northanger.
Is she embarrassed simply at the peremptory suddenness of her
father's decision to leave Bath early? Or has the General, having
heard of Catherine's prospects as unnaturally magnified by John
Thorpe, actually charged his daughter with the invitation, and
has she realized his motive? Both reasons would fit, although the
second will not appear on a first reading, as we do not yet know
of John's conversation with the General. The story to date, our
knowledge of the relationships between the Tilneys, and the first
paragraph of the chapter, all incline the reader to something
close to the first explanation. And so, as Eric Rothstein says of
this scene, "we work by probabilities and are wrong" ("Lessons,"
p. 25). The General has, it transpires, laid his positive injunction
on Henry to do "every thing in his power to attach" Catherine
(p. 246), and Eleanor seems to have been expected to play her
part also.
So the probable reading of an enigmatic emotion is not nec-
essarily the right one. In considering the scene of the conver-
sation about Frederick and Isabella, a careful, Henryish reading
turned against Henry would tell us that he is often disengaged
and ironical. Hence he is capable of reserving himself behind a
duplicitous facade in order to avoid revealing his estimate of
Frederick. But the balance of the passage suggests otherwise.
Henry seems to be genuinely responding to Catherine's unease,
to her desire for comfort. When she earlier ascribed to good
nature Frederick's willingness to dance with Isabella, Henry
merely smiled and spoke archly, choosing to disappear into his
customary ironical bolt-hole. Here, though, he is unwilling to be
arch, and instead suggests that the world might be a better place
if it could be read from Catherine's viewpoint, from her "na-
ture." He is beginning to learn something important, which he
will need to learn more fully if he is to come into complete dra-
matic relationship with Catherine and marry her. Marriage is,
after all, Jane Austen's symbol for the reconciliation of different
psychological and moral forces. If the marriage of Catherine
and Henry is to mean more than "gratitude" and "partiality" (p.
243), Henry must become aware of her as a partner in some
fuller sense and (as they are so different) learn to modify his
attitudes accordingly.
But in volume II, chapter 9, near the crisis of the story,
Henry suffers a serious relapse. Catherine has sneaked wide-
eyed into his mother's apartments and has found them to be
modern and comfortable, not at all (as she had predicted)
gloomy, Gothic, and mysterious. Her heart fills with the con-
sciousness of her own folly. Henry performs yet another of his
unpredictable entrances, in this case popping up the stairs and
making the heroine gasp, exclaim, and blush. Catherine explains
where she has been. A scene then takes place in which Henry
is able to infer, from a mere six lines hesitantly spoken, Cath-
erine's fantasy about the death of his mother:
"Her dying so suddenly . . . and you-none of you being at home-

and your father, I thought-perhaps had not been very fond of her."
"And from these circumstances," he replied, (his quick eye fixed
on her's,) "you infer perhaps the probability of some negligence-
some-(involuntarily she shook her head)-or it may be-of some-
thing still less pardonable." (p. 196)
He describes the circumstances of his mother's death. Catherine

asks whether the General was "afflicted" (p. 197) by the event.
Henry replies with a series of "curiously ambivalent protesta-
tions," or, as Kearful puts it more strongly ("Satire," p. 523),
"careful qualifications and deviously negative and double neg-
ative circumlocutions":
"For a time, greatly so. You have erred in supposing him not at-
tached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible
for him to-We have not all, you know, the same tenderness of dis-
position-and I will not pretend to say that while she lived, she might
not often have had much to bear, but though his temper injured her,
his judgment never did. His value of her was sincere; and, if not per-
manently, he was truly afflicted by her death."
"I am very glad of it," said Catherine. (p. 197)
Her response clutches hold, as usual, of the final phrase of one

of Henry's perplexing speeches. Rather than asking why news
of his father's afflictions should make her glad, Henry then
switches at once into his authoritative, commanding mode of
speech in order to harangue Catherine's imaginings-some-
thing he need not do, given that she has just been reproaching
herself for them:
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions

you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember
the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are En-
glish, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your
own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing
around you-Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do
our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being
known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is
on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbour-
hood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every
thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admit-
ting? (pp. 197-98).
This is the fullest, most complicated tour deforce in the novel's

drama of conflicting values. Henry's words are given plausibility
and probability in several senses. There is first his direct appeal
to probability in the form of the real world of contemporary
England; things as they are. His speech is also probable in the
sense previously mentioned, of sounding righteous, positive,
and sure of its grounds, despite Catherine having said virtually
nothing to confirm his inference. It conforms to yet another
meaning of the term in being in its proper place in the story.
The reader's probable expectations of the stock climax of an
anti-Jacobin novel would encourage anticipation and recogni-
tion of this moment as that necessary, almost inevitable climax
where the overimaginative, overenthusiastic heroine is re-
proached and humbled by the (usually male) voice of reason and
realism.20 It thus conforms to, and contributes to, probability, in
forming a satisfying part of the fable and inviting the reader to
infer the moral: that a Catherine Morland, if she is to learn to
live in the mundane world of England, needs to pass through
moments such as this. The machinery of the story may be won-
derfully bad, but this does not mean that we can do without
probable expectations of this sort.
Then there is yet another, more highly ironical sense in
which Henry's words are probable, in that they relate to the real
world in a way of which he is unconscious. B. C. Southam points
out that the "neighbourhood of voluntary spies," "while mem-
orable as a figurative turn-of-phrase, also possesses a literal his-
torical meaning" in the 1810s.2' The government of the day was
widely known to be in the habit of using what amounted to a
national spy-system to gather intelligence about radical work-
ingmens' associations. So, as Southam says, the informed con-
temporary reader who did consult his own sense of the probable
20Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p.
166, says that "the moment of self-discovery and self-abasement, followed by the
resolve in future to follow reason, is the climactic moment of the majority of anti-
jacobin novels." John Sparrow raises the possibility ("Jane Austen and Sydney
Smith," Times Literary Supplement [London], 2 July 1954, p. 429) that Henry Tilney
is intended as a portrait of the Rev. Sydney Smith, who was in Bath in 1797, as was
Austen. Smith shared Henry's eye for a muslin, as well as something of his manner
of speech. If Henry has an original in the real world, this once again reinforces his
"probability."
21" 'Regulated Hatred' Revisited," in Jane Austen: "Northanger Abbey" and "Persua-
sion": A Casebook, ed. B.C. Southam (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 123.
would come up with a disconcerting answer-just as with Hen-
ry's lines on riots in London, "the joke has a hollow ring" ("'Reg-
ulated Hatred,"' p. 124).
But as fast as Austen ladles probability, or mock-probability,
into the passage, it leaks out and runs away, because the passage
does not feel in the least natural. It is hard, at first, to see quite
why it should have such a strong residual power to make readers
uneasy, because none of it appears out of character for Henry.
He has been positive and authoritative before, and has been al-
lowed to lecture Catherine on other subjects. There are, though,
two curious aspects of his speech and attitude that complicate
the position.
The first is the remarkable speed and precision with which
he infers the nature of Catherine's imaginings, and the conse-
quent eagerness and facility with which he fulfills his role in the
fable. He appeals to probability and to common sense. But the
motif of the male lover whose sympathy with the beloved object
is so strong as to allow him to penetrate her mind while hardly
any words are spoken is not a feature of a realistic novel of com-
mon life, but of a sentimental romance. So as Henry dismisses
the Gothic plot in the name of probability and realism he be-
comes the occult hero: a very absurd situation for him. The au-
thor's breathless interjections as to her actors' movements, such
as "(involuntarily she shook her head)," and the careful romantic
positioning-"She raised her eyes towards him more fully than
she had ever done before" (p. 196)-create an ambience in
which Henry stands no chance at all of sounding natural or prob-
able. He must be plausible to the reader, simply because he is
right, but he is certainly not probable in any full sense. Once
again a scene has revealed itself as both natural and absurd, both
a piece of convincing psychological drama and a scene from the
kind of literature that Catherine thinks is to blame for her imag-
inings and her predicament. Faced with this bizarre combined
assault from Henry and her author, Catherine bursts into tears
and blames Mrs. Radcliffe.
The second problem is that Henry's words are out of char-
acter for his mind, in that he has reversed his usual pattern of
mental behavior. Previously he took care to determine what class
of beings the person in question belonged to, and then found
the appropriate mode of conversation or argument; but here he
is working the other way around, from the general to the par-
ticular. He first presents his picture of the state of the nation,
and then deduces from this how a Catherine Morland should
respond. This is closer to bullying than to educative probable
inference: the world is as I see it, and you must see it like this
too. So there is a second reason why his appeal to the probable
carries so little conviction for us-he has, for once, taken his eye
off Catherine. If one began from her, the proper question would
be whether it is probable that an impressionable, largely unedu-
cated seventeen-year-old girl would be able to argue from the
state of the world as it is commonly supposed to be, to the par-
ticular condition and history of an intriguing, enigmatic, and
perplexing family.
Clearly it is not probable. Catherine must argue from per-
sonal experience, as we all must, and her experience to date has
been the largely artificial worlds of Bath and the Gothic novel.
Given the strange atmosphere at Northanger and General Til-
ney's uncanny manifestation as parental tyrant, she is forced to
argue as she does. But then, Henry is upset-or at least we might
infer that he is, from the fact that his mind has been forced into
reverse and his tones into the unnatural. Jane Austen has more
important tricks to play with Henry than to reveal or discuss his
state of mind, and it is necessary that we should not read him
more expertly than Catherine can at this point.
For whatever reason, then, Henry pursues Catherine with
reassurance and comfort through the next chapter. She has in-
ferred from the scene at the top of the stairs that she is "sunk"
(p. 199) with Henry and with herself. As usual, her inference is
drastically wide of the mark, but for the moment only her au-
thor's pet mock-disastrous comic verb "to sink" (as in "sinking
half the children" [p. 245] in the penultimate chapter) gives any
hint of her mistake. In her hopeless agony Catherine dismisses
the Radcliffean romance, berating it in particular for its lack of
mixed characters. In fact the very first chapter of The Italian care-
fully disabuses the reader of the likelihood of unmixed or un-
naturally evil characters.22
22In this introductory chapter members of a party of English travelers near Na-
ples express astonishment to their Italian guide at the local custom of granting as-
NORTHANGER ABBEY 23
By the end of the next chapter Henry's attentions have
calmed Catherine enough for him to feel that he can set her a
test of character. He again argues, or pretends to argue, between
the individual and the class. If Catherine is a characteristic
reader of Gothic fiction, she will probably respond to the loss of
Isabella, who has decamped with Frederick, as such a reader
might:
"You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself:
you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.... You
feel all this?"
"No," said Catherine. . . "ought I? To say the truth, though I am
hurt and grieved, that I cannot still love her . . . I do not feel so very,
very much afflicted as one would have thought." (p. 207)
Proving deaf to artificial tones, she has merely answered the

question. Henry's point is made, and he can now speak those
lines that, though still rather artificial, carry a kind of authority
that we have not previously associated with him: "You feel, as
you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature.-
Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know them-
selves" (p. 207).
At last the novel has produced a form of reconciliation be-
tween its central terms. The sentimental values associated with
good nature are toned down, changed toward a public, observ-
able, moral positive: "credit." Technical analysis of character is
changed from Henry's previous arch knowingness about others
into a form of investigation that can reveal simple good nature
in and to its owner, without patronizing, lecturing, or distressing.
Henry is still fully in character, using his analytical tone, but he,
like us, has been touched by Catherine's response. What may be
hard to realize about his conclusions is that if he is including all
of Catherine's reactions ("as you always do") under the heading
of "what is most to the credit of human nature," then this must
be intended to include her Gothic absurdities in earlier scenes-
most especially her recently exposed fantasy about the relation-
ship between Henry's parents. He realizes that her nature is such
as to make her incapable of insincere and pretentious responses.
sassins sanctuary in churches. The guide mordantly observes that "if we were to
shew no mercy to such unfortunate persons, assassinations are so frequent, that our
cities would be half depopulated" (pp. 2-3).
To critical eyes she might have been a fatuous prima donna,
overdramatic and absurd, but no longer to him. "Open, candid,
artless, guileless ... forming no pretensions, and knowing no dis-
guise" (p. 206). Eleanor, knowing her brother, recognizes this
ironic eulogy of Isabella as direct admiration of Catherine. In
a more realistic novel Henry's inability to be straightforwardly
appreciative of another without using the distancing mode of
irony would be evidence of a neurotic personality. Here, though,
the blend of tones goes to the heart of the novel's comedy, to
the fact that Catherine may legitimately be seen in two ways at
once. She may be an object of burlesque and ironical humor,
and she may be the abused and distressed good-hearted heroine;
at the end of the previous chapter, abused and distressed by
Henry himself.
Armed with this new implicit knowledge about his view of
the world, Henry may now safely act out of character in op-
posing his father and arriving at Fullerton to offer Catherine his
hand. Who could have guessed or predicted that he would pop
up so unexpectedly yet again? Readers could, of course, having
been browbeaten into anticipating a happy ending. However, it
appears that Catherine, who is, as usual, surprised and agitated
by his entrance, will never learn the art of probable conjecture,
simply because she will never need to. Henry also disregards
probability, in the sense that he refuses to act according to the
dictates of the merely financial prudence implied in his father's
mercenary attitude toward Catherine. The good end is not to
be achieved through the calculating choices of worldly wisdom,
but through the challenge to repressive authority that is more
characteristic of Gothic-romantic heroes such as Vivaldi. As we
take our leave of Henry, admiring his lack of prudence, we notice
that Catherine is admiring him for appearing to possess it. He
has, as she thinks, prudently proposed to her (with "kind cau-
tion" [p. 244]) before informing her of his father's refusal to
consent to the marriage, and has hence spared her the pain of
having to refuse his proposal for reasons of propriety. Prudence
would be in character for Henry; it is only Catherine who cannot
see that she has made the prudential leopard change his spots.
With this mordant vignette of cross purposes the drama is
resolved, and the author withdraws from the scene. An appro-
priate closure must be found for the narrative, so Austen turns
once more to the central subject, playing with the idea of prob-
ability in order first to provoke and then destroy the reader's
expectations of probable conclusions. She begins with the claim,
now revealed as a palpable absurdity, that probability may in-
deed furnish such conclusions. The General has changed his
mind, and is pleased to allow the marriage to take place. What
a puzzle-"what probable circumstance could work upon a tem-
per like the General's?" (p. 250). It transpires that Eleanor has
married a sufficiently wealthy admirer whom we have never met
(though we have seen his laundry bills), and the General is meta-
morphosed yet again, this time into a benevolent toady. The
news about Eleanor is presented twice, with differing effects. Ini-
tially it is brief and natural: "the marriage of his daughter with
a man of fortune and consequence" (p. 250). In probable nar-
ratives deserving maidens will marry desirable young men with
funds, and Eleanor is a nice girl. But then the announcement
is replayed with more trumpets, and is promptly transformed
to transparent absurdity: "his unexpected accession to title and
fortune . . . his peerage, his wealth, and his attachment, being
to a precision the most charming young man in the world" (p.
25 1). What was easy to accept becomes too burlesque to be worth
accepting, a mere trick of the light. For the last time, the natural
and the absurd are made to coalesce around probability.
Also, the question posed about General Tilney, as to "what
probable circumstance could work upon" a temper such as his,
has hinted at an answer to B. C. Southam's interesting question
about him. The General is beyond probability, though in a dif-
ferent sense from Catherine. It is not his malevolence or nature
that disconcert Catherine or us, so much as his inconsistency and
unpredictability. His moods and responses are completely at the
mercy of a plausible story or the precision of his mealtimes. He
suffers metamorphosis first from eighteenth-century patriarch
to worrying enigma, then to repressive and rapacious ogre, and
then, most bizarrely, to sentimental good humor. That Austen
makes sure that he is also given the fullest possible grounding
in the other kind of probability, his relations with the sociopoliti-
cal world of the day, is a further demonstration of her novel's
fundamental comic vision.
After the news about Eleanor's marriage every conceivable
narrative thread has been wound up, and we feel that we might
be on the verge of a moral, a "probable conclusion." Instead we
find the author overcome by the atmosphere of universal hap-
piness and smiles at the wedding, and spending her final sen-
tence insouciantly disclaiming all knowledge of the moral ten-
dency of her story, whether this be to have recommended
parental tyranny or rewarded filial disobedience. So, as in other
Augustan novels of ideas, "nothing is concluded" in the conclu-
sion,23 and the book ends as it began, in conscious and self-
consistent ambiguity and playfulness: a wholly achieved dra-
matic narrative, and a virtuoso demonstration of the limits of
the several kinds of probability that inform such narratives in
the eighteenth century.
It may well be that these characteristic techniques of ellipsis
and double or paradoxical comedy are overambitious and hard
to follow, and that nuances of feeling and relationship are con-
veyed more satisfactorily in Austen's other, less aggressively ex-
perimental novels. Yet the debate between the central terms does
undoubtedly succeed in reinforcing both the drama and the nov-
el's general aesthetic integrity. This is because Northanger Abbey
is based on a premise that, though essentially realistic, is also dual
and paradoxical. This premise is, first, that unnatural Gothic
novels, and the affected reactions and behavior of some of those
who read them, are silly, and as such are worth poking fun at.
But second, it is that the emotions of young women who are in
the process of going out into the world may be heightened to
such a degree as to make them feel that life is as exciting, and
as unlike the "4natural" world to which they have been accus-
tomed, as is a Gothic romance.
Northanger Abbey discovers this second principle much more
slowly than the first. Catherine herself only discovers it slowly
(and rather oddly), and the story should not proceed much more
quickly than its heroine if we are to be involved in her experi-
ence. Her problem, and our problem with her, is that in the
middle of the story she learns the second part of the premise
23See Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. Geoffrey Til-
lotson and Brian Jenkins (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 133.
NORTHANGER ABBEY 27
literally rather than figuratively. She begins to read exciting life
as a Gothic romance, rather than sensing that it might be only
a metaphor or an analogy. From this stems the one outstanding
critical problem: the "improbable" change in Catherine's char-
acter between Bath and Northanger. However, it transpires that
there are good, probable reasons for this improbable change; at
least, there are if "probable" is understood in its usual double
sense.
The transition between Catherine at Bath and at Northan-
ger is anticipated, and in large part effected, in the course of the
invitation to the Abbey that General Tilney extends to her in
volume II, chapter 2. Henry's teasing on the journey a little later
only compounds the effect. The cause of Catherine's change lies
in the General's unexpected-unpredictable-mode of address,
which is based on his tacit assumption that the unsophisticated
girl to whom he is speaking is, in financial terms, as heroic as
himself. With his mind full of her putative assets, he caresses
her with words, working on her feelings until he arrives at his
lucky climax:
"Can you, in short, be prevailed on to quit this scene of public triumph

and oblige your friend Eleanor with your company in Gloucester-
shire? . . . If you can be induced to honour us with a visit, you will
make us happy beyond expression. . . no endeavours shall be wanting
on our side to make Northanger Abbey not wholly disagreeable."
Northanger Abbey!-These were thrilling words, and wound up
Catherine's feelings to the highest point of extasy.... To receive so
flattering an invitation! (pp. 139-40)
The General's extravagant courtship of Catherine-as-

heroine calls forth an equally extravagant response in her, as is
only natural. Its most important side effect, though, is adven-
titious: it is to teach her an association she has never before
made, between Gothic attributes at large (the Abbey) and intense
personal emotions in herself. She begins to respond like a dif-
ferent kind of heroine, translating basic emotions onto a higher
level.
Austen then twice forces the point about Catherine's con-
fusion of emotional levels. First she takes the bizarre disjunction
between expression and feelings inherent in the General's ad-
dress and its reception and transfers it directly into Catherine's
internal scene: "with spirits elated to rapture, with Henry at her
heart, and Northanger Abbey on her lips, she hurried home to
write her letter" (p. 140). This trails the delicate suggestion that
the Gothic might be capable of becoming the unconsciously sub-
limated expression of Catherine's feelings about Henry. This
hint is expanded as Catherine, following the associations created
by the General's address, reflects on her coming trip to
Northanger:
She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be for weeks under the
same roof with the person whose society she mostly prized-and, in
addition to all the rest, this roof was to be the roof of an abbey!-Her
passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for
Henry Tilney-and castles and abbies made usually the charm of
those reveries which his image did not fill. To see and explore either
the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters of the other, had
been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more than the visitor
of an hour, had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. (p. 141)24
In these last two sentences the process of sublimation is allowed

to reach out from Catherine's mind into the writing. After hav-
ing seemed to place "Henry Tilney" and "ancient edifices" in
opposition, the final sentence has in fact only made use of the
subordinate opposition of "castles" and "abbies." The passage
has discreetly edited Henry out of itself, drawing a syntactical
veil over those parts of him that Catherine might have wanted
to explore. At the same time, the word "desire" ends a highly
mannered phrase with a reminder of Catherine's natural im-
pulses. Catherine may be left rapt in wonder at the anticipated
view of Henry's crenellations, but the author has also managed
to reinforce very strongly the reader's sense of her heroine's
"passion" for Henry. Something that was only "a secret 'per-
haps"' (p. 138) at the start of the chapter has been brought into
full light for the reader, though not for Catherine, who has been
distracted by what she takes to be a brighter illumination. In a
24Alan D. McKillop tactfully raises the possibilities inherent in this passage and
the preceding one in "Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey," in From Jane Austen to
Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory ofJames T Hillhouse, ed. Robert C. Rathburn
and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 35-
45.
NORTHANGER ABBEY 29
single chapter she has been transformed into a close analogy of
the sentimental Gothic heroine. She lifts her excited emotions
above common things, much as Ellena, in The Italian, will raise
her fears and potential terrors into adoration of a sensed deity
by transferring her attention from her own immediate circum-
stances to the tremendous, sublime landscapes of the novel.25
The natural world may act as a stimulus to sublime emotion for
the Gothic heroine; so, by a happy reversal, the Gothic world
may temporarily act as a comic sublime for the natural heroine.
Catherine becomes a Gothic prima donna, and hence, as critics
agree, absurd and unlikely. But she is brought to this condition
by the dramatic consequences of a wholly natural misunder-
standing on the part of the General: treat a simple girl as a her-
oine and she will respond as one, if not quite as you might have
predicted.
It is clearly important, given the novel's themes of the limits
of prudential and literary probability, that Catherine should not
be a fully probable girl. She is internally self-consistent, but the
stimuli that strike on her in the General's invitation, in Henry's
teasing on the journey to Northanger, and at the Abbey, are pe-
culiar and forceful. So are her responses. Catherine could not
have predicted that the General would be as he is at Northanger;
similarly, no one could predict the later Catherine from the one
visible at Bath. Characters in novels may be fully and visibly
probable, but characters in real life are not; and Northanger Abbey
is conspicuously both a novel of real life, and merely a novel.
University of Wales
University College of Swansea
25See for example The Italian, volume I, chapter 8, especially pp. 90-91.

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Northanger Abbey; Or, Nature and Probability

Author(s): Mark Loveridge

to7WOULD like to explore the possibility that

C 1991 by The Regents of the University of California

'George Levine, "Translating the Monstrous: NorthangerAbbey," Nineteenth-Century

4See "The Lessons of Northanger Abbey," University of Toronto Quarterly, 44 (1974),

a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields; the

He is allowed to speak as though this vision were simply the sup-

"private exertion" and "proper economy." A "system of cultivating parochial farms,

Probability is often on Henry's lips in vol-

Catherine is confused and a little frightened by this, and no won-

"Her dying so suddenly . . . and you-none of you being at home-

He describes the circumstances of his mother's death. Catherine

Her response clutches hold, as usual, of the final phrase of one

Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions

This is the fullest, most complicated tour deforce in the novel's

Proving deaf to artificial tones, she has merely answered the

"Can you, in short, be prevailed on to quit this scene of public triumph

The General's extravagant courtship of Catherine-as-

In these last two sentences the process of sublimation is allowed

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