Breaking the Rules - Opposites and Absences in Northanger Abbey

When Jane Austen tells us in the very first sentence of Northanger Abbey that Catherine is nothing like a heroine, and is in fact the very last girl you would ever suspect of being a heroine, she sets the mood perfectly for the way she is going to tell us this story. Instead of giving readers what they expect, (readers having learned to expect certain things from the popular novels of their time), she surprises them with characters and plots that don’t follow all the rules. Mind you, while she was certainly mocking the stereotyped characters and plotlines of 18^th century literature, she did use them as a framework for her own story. By inverting them, or pointedly leaving them out, she was able to tell a romantic coming of age story in a unique yet familiar way.

The description of Catherine is the first example – as a child she had a “thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features”(5), then growing up, she was called “almost pretty”(6). That’s pretty bad, for a leading lady. Readers up to this had been taught to expect beauty in their heroines. So, beauty is absent. Austen goes on to describe other things that are commonly present in novels of this sort, but are absent from Catherine’s story – her father’s addiction to locking up his daughters (5), lords, baronets, or young men of unknown origin living in her village (8), and robbers, tempests and carriage accidents that might make for adventure on her journey (10). At the first ball she attends “not one … started with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager enquiry ran round the room, nor was she once called a divinity by anybody” (13).  Much later, when she is taken to the Abbey, all the anticipation that Catherine and the readers feel, based on “what one reads about” (107), turns out to be for nothing. She doesn’t even notice as she passes through the gates of Northanger, because the building is so low. She (and the readers) had been expecting to see “walls of great stone, rising amidst a grove of ancient oaks” (110).

General Tilney’s attitude to Catherine is surprising too. We would normally expect a character like that to dismiss someone as inconsequential as Catherine – but he goes the opposite way, and treats her like a princess. It’s disconcerting because he doesn’t seem to have any reason to be doing this. And when he banishes her from the Abbey and sends her off by herself on a public coach with no money and no help, it’s the absolute opposite of how we would expect a heroine to be treated at the end of the story.  As Austen says “A heroine returning, at the close of her career, to her native village… [with] all the dignity of a countess... is an event on which the pen of the contriver may well delight to dwell; it gives delight to every conclusion…But my affair is widely different” (160). At every critical point, Jane Austen gives readers the opposite of what they might have expected.

Even at the end of the story, Jane throws one more custard pie at the rules. She actually tells us that (this time) she will abide by them, by not bringing in a new character on the last page (173).  It feels like Austen introduced us to all of the characters and situations in Northanger Abbey with a sort of a wink. Sort of a “I know what you’re thinking… but you might be mistaken - wait and see” thing.  In the end, she got away with telling a regular romance story that followed the same directions as all the rest, but she was laughing at them as she did so. It’s fun to see how a story told in this way can still turn out to have that happy ending that everyone wants!