Being a twenty first century reader reading an eighteenth
century novel, getting through Northanger
Abbey for me was a little bit on the challenging side, chiefly because of
the novel’s overly “literary” writing style, which involved paragraph-long sentences
and antiquated dialogue. However, an element that I also found to be initially
distracting but later intriguing was the author’s tendency to inject herself
into the story. We first notice this on page 33, when the narrator explains why
she is quickly skimming Mrs Thorpe’s personal history. Basically, to provide a
more thorough insight would entail “three or four following chapters” of
redundant recollections of various characters and conversations. I did not feel that I was taken out of the
story. After all, it isn’t particularly easy for me to truly immerse myself in
a story that I read more as an insight into the social climate of eighteenth
century Europe. Instead, I got the sense that the author felt that both she and
the reader were new to the concept of a fictional novel, and therefore felt it
necessary to peel the curtain back and explain why things were. This being
Austen’s first novel, this explanation seems to make sense.
However, it is when Catherine and Isabelle are discussing
novels in chapter V that the author puts her foot down and offers not just an
explanation, but an opinion. In a very jarring transition, the author goes from
describing Catherine and Isabelle’s mutual interest in novels to putting up a
defense of novel reading while criticizing reviewers who, at the time,
disparaged novel reading. This is where I feel that things get quite out of
hand. The final page and a half of the chapter is spent entirely on extolling
the wonders of novels, where “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in
which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of
its varieties […] are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” To
make a contemporary allusion, this, for me, would be like Zero Dark Thirty having one of its characters suddenly turning to
the audience and going on a rant on everything that makes waterboarding wrong.
With that said, Northanger Abbey is clearly
a work whose historical context must be taken into consideration upon reading.
It is obviously difficult for me to understand where Austen is coming from when
she has to explain the virtues of novels, which today are universally accepted
as the bearers of some of the greatest literary works. Reading the novel from a
more educational, historical perspective, the author’s interjection serves as
an interesting nugget of evidence of a society that regarded novels in a
different light. Reading the novel purely for its fictional story, it is an
unnecessary bump in the road that serves no purpose.
Having been greatly informed by the various works and critical essays read in class, Northanger Abbey's invasive narrator does not seem particularly annoying anymore, especially compared to the likes of Tristram Shandy and Charles Kinbote. Stanley Fish proposed that the manner in which we approach fiction writing is heavily influenced by our life experiences and learned expectations of fiction writing, and when I first read Northanger Abbey I was bringing in my expectations that novels were linear, coherent narratives with narrators that sometimes involved themselves in the plot, but not to the degree of halting it entirely in the manner of Northanger Abbey's.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, while Northanger Abbey is largely in the vein of many of Jane Austin's works, which feature female protagonists in social dilemmas, it is more implicitly an examination of the ludicrousness of having artificially constructed expectations of the real world. Catherine, an avid fan of Gothic novels, constantly expects Northanger Abbey to be as mysterious and scary as the ones in her books. Yet her expectations are met with disappointment every single time. An ominous chest in her room has nothing but a laundry list. Henry's disturbed father is not, in fact, his wife's murderer. And so on. As the reader, I was a bit disappointed, because like Catherine, I was also bringing in my preconceived notions of novels, which generally feature situations that are out of the ordinary. But Northanger Abbey, and indeed many of Jane Austin's works, are not like that. Though the characters and the stories are fictional, they are set in the real world. In the real world, who on earth would keep a rotting corpse in a chest in the guest bedroom? What normally made sense in works of fiction is ridiculous in the context of real life.
This brings me back to the narrator of the novel. Like the building Northanger Abbey itself and Catherine, the narrator is only as intrusive and annoying as the reader will allow her to be. This is more pertinent considering when one takes into account that this is Austin's first novel. It is unfair for me to impose what Fish would call my artificially constructed expectations upon a work that is precisely about the ridiculousness of imposing said artificial expectations upon the real world. Northanger Abbey is a novel that is clearly determined in going about things in its own way, so a narrator who suddenly breaks off the narrative to go on a rant should be welcomed with intrigue and at the very worst as an invitation to challenge the reader. Either way, it should not be shunned.