To Janeites

Re: NA: The Bath v Northanger Sections

Yesterday Juliet Youngren wrote:

'I really do wonder whether the "Bath" and "Northanger" sections of NA were written at different times. The Bath chapters really do seem much better to me than the later part of the book. I wouldn't even be surprised if the theory could be proven that she had started a thorough revision of the work before her death, interrupted at about the point where Catherine travels to the Abbey. That is my subjective impression. We've just read NA and are currently on S&S; what does everyone else think? Does it feel like a step forward or backward in maturity to go from one to the other?'

There are a couple of essays (which I cite on my homepage where I have placed my Calendar for NA) in which people have argued, I think persuasively, that the two sections are different in mood, aspect, and even point of view on the Gothic. There is a distinct change in the handling of time between the Bath and Northanger sections too: the former realistic, diurnal, the latter psychological and expanded. In these essays the writers suggest the two sections were written at different times, and the tendency is to see the Northanger sections as coming first. NA began as a parody and imitation of Ann Radcliffe. I agree. Where I would differ with Juliet, is I do not find the Northanger sections at all inferior to the Bath. In our recent read, I think we found much beauty, interest, thought and all sorts of perceptions about the human mind and landscapes inside and outside that mind in them. I suggest the sections are different, and it's a matter of taste and imagination which the reader prefers. My view is both sections are blended together, woven, so as to make the book the fascinating object it is.

If you want to find a section in S&S similar to those in the Northanger sections of NA, read the chapters in the third volume beginning where Marianne falls sick, and taking us through to just beyond Willoughby's visit. You will find the same slow-downing of time, deep-musing use of trauma, description, and use of light and dark and retrospective. Elizabeth Jenkins has a good section on this part of S&S; she suggests it is one of the best and strongest parts of the novel (especially where Elinor sits by Marianne's bed and watches the clock and listens for sounds outside). I don't know that the sequence at Cleveland in S&S and the sequence at Northanger in NA were written close in time. However, consider that Cassandra dated the second full version of S&S as between 1997-8, and the first full draft of NA as between 1798-99.

Cheers to all
Ellen Moody

Doriswhite@AOL.COM Subject: NA

First of all, it seems that Austen is not consistent in this novel. I have now read all of the novels but Sandition and have not felt this way before.

A friend who is an Austen scholar has been writing a book about NA, after spending considerable time with the actual manuscripts, and not copies, in the Bodlean Library in England, maintains that JA was in the middle of rewriting NA before setting it aside, possibly right before her death. It would explain the considerable differences in tone, in detail, and in dialog between the first half and the second. The first half, he says, is the more recent; the intent was to place an average young lady--not very well educated as most young ladies weren't in those days--in a situation where she might be taken to be a heroine of contemporary romances. All the cliches of potboiler romances are noted, usually to be dismissed.

Secondly, someone posted that John Thorpe was a buffoon. To me, he is more than that; he is vicious. In addition to lying to the General, when he tells Eleanor and Henry Tilney that Catherine had cancelled her plans with them, I was outraged. He seems to be totally immoral, using any means to gain his ends as does his sister. That is why in our previous discussion of Thorpe's anti-semitic comment, I do believe Austen put those words in this throughly disagreeable character's mouth so that he would be regarded as abhorrent from the very first since his remarks occur in the beginning of the novel.

Not vicious, but a total flake. Remember James' words at the beginning, "he's a rattle, but that will recommend him to your sex." JA is not only satirizing this type of young man, but the young women who like them. Only an idiot--like General Tilney--would listen to someone who contradicts himself in every other sentence, when he's not obviously exaggerating for effect.

Doris

RE: NA: Speculations Upon the History of the Revisions

Yesterday Doris wrote the following interesting comment on what several of us have now talked about as "the inconsistencies" in NA:

"A friend who is an Austen scholar has been writing a book about NA, after spending considerable time with the actual manuscripts, and not copies, in the Bodlean Library in England, maintains that JA was in the middle of rewriting NA before setting it aside, possibly right before her death. It would explain the considerable differences in tone, in detail, and in dialog between the first half and the second. The first half, he says, is the more recent; the intent was to place an average young lady--not very well educated as most young ladies weren't in those days--in a situation where she might be taken to be a heroine of contemporary romances. All the cliches of potboiler romances are noted, usually to be dismissed."

Doris and I have been discussing the difficult nature of a text intended sometimes to be read as a satire and sometimes to be read as an inward psychological novel. My idea was that Austen intended her work to be this way; that is, she knows she shifts after the whole of Chapter 1 and half way through Chapter 2 from a satire with a naif and strong narrative presence to a novel written in the manner of Emma where we are in the realistically presented psychological presence of a mind we are told is Catherine Morland's and experience the world from within it in such as way as to judge what is in front of us through identifying with it situationally.

But one could make an equally strong argument that what we have here are two different aims which are at loggerheads because the author has changed her mind and is struggling with some incalcitrant material originally meant to do one thing and now meant to do another or more than that one thing (satirize gothic and sentimental novels. I believe that is Doris's view (she will correct me if I'm wrong). That Austen was at work on the novel is suggested by her comment in 1816 that she is at long last or for the moment (and the implication is after much struggle) putting Catherine on the shelf.

But of especial interest here is Christopher Reese's observation: "I am reading a good bit ahead of the schedule (I am presently in Chapter 25) and I have encountered a strange phenomenon. It seems that ever since Catherine left Bath, I have entered a totally different book. Not only are the main characters and setting very different, it seems the very style of writing has changed. Is this where JA begins to really parody the "Gothic" style, because I thought that the whole book was meant to be a parody. Also is this place (where Catherine leaves Bath to go to NA) where the book is broken into volumes because my copy is not seperated into volumes?"

I wonder why the person "thinks the first half of NA" is more recent than the second." It was my understanding that there were no manuscripts of the novels, only of the fragments and juvenilia. What manuscripts in the Bodleian are being referred to here? What in these manuscripts leads the friend to this conclusion? I agree with Christopher that there is a decided palpable break between the mood of the book at Bath and at Northanger Abbey. The mood in the second half of the book is somehow deeper; it has a deep musing quality; Austen uses slow psychological time in a way she does not in the earlier sections of the book in which she really is content to imitate the calendar through analogical techniques (like chapters, and so many paragraphs to denote the passing of time over a few days).

I have always been curious about the name of this book: Northanger Abbey. After all only one sequence in it occurs at the Abbey. The opener is in Bath; the closer in Wiltshire. Although in LeFaye's Family Record LeFaye says after Austen was dead, Cassandra told her family members, many titles for Persuasion were discussed when Jane Austen was alive, and named only "The Eliots" among them, I believe Chapman reprints a note Austen left on a manuscript which uses the word "Persuasion" for the title. (Unhappily I can't find the page in Chapman's JA: Facts and Problems where this appears.) I wonder if Henry Austen was following his sister's desire in naming the book Northanger Abbey; insofar as her texts are concerned he seems to have been as faithful to her wishes for them as he could be. He knew her more intimately as anyone did--if he didn't know her as continually and live with her in the way Cassandra did, he knew her as well. Of course her letters to him and his to hers were destroyed (possibly by Cassandra, possibly by someone else in the family, maybe Henry himself--Charles ends some of his letters with the command "Burn this.") I also wonder if he knew what the original draft had been. It is not uncommon for author's to begin a text in the middle. The original draft of Frankenstein begins at Chapter 5 with the "birth" of the monster. Willa Cather's The Professor's House began with Tom Outland's story which not appears as a set piece sandwiched inbetween sections which occur in a social world, not the brilliant retreat into New Mexico that makes the novel.

The Northanger sequence may be said to begin in Volume II, Chapter 5 (or in consecutively numbered editions Chapter 20). Henry's brilliant parody of the gothic mode may be then placed where it is as a kind of transition into Austen's own far more powerful because psychologically inward and sustained version of the experience while in the consciousness of a naif. (You see I stick to my position that she meant to blend two modes.)

Ellen Moody

From: Sherwood Smith

It was I, and the scholar friend is Arthur Axelrad, recently retired from Cal State Long Beach. It's been a while since we discussed his NORTHANGER book, so I do not feel confident in speaking for him. What I retain from our conversations are corroborations of my own guesses; that the older portion of the manuscript is that which takes place after the Tilneys and Catherine leave Bath. (I don't recall whether the brilliant 'Gothic plot' that Henry entertains Catherine with is old or new.) But I remember commenting that the second half was sparse in dialogue, and long on exposition, but one of the things that made the first half so engaging was the realistic detail stithced together by funny narrative, the conversations, the insights. I will be talking to him again, and I will ask some pertinent questions.

Re the theory, I agree. I have had the feeling for some time now that Austen, in blowing up the old cliches of gothic romance and replacing them with realistic human reactions to gothic-novel tropes, kept slipping from irony into realistic detail--and from there into p=psychological insight. It's only her style that keeps it all together. Isabella, I suspect, is a composit of the social habits of young women that she despises most. You can tell that Isabella's favorite phrases "beautiful as an angel" "haven't seen you this ten ages" etc, etc, were constantly in the mouths of young ladies who used their heads primarily for headdresses.

Re those favorite lines, I can't help but be reminded of Nabokov's brilliant phrase for Austen's style: 'knight's move.'

Here's Nabokov, on (ta da! on topic and everything!) MANSFIELD PARK:

"Especially in dealing with Fanny's reactions, Austen uses a device that I call the =knight's move=, a term from chess to describe a sudden swerve to one or the other side of the board of Fanny's chequered emotions. At Sir Thomas's deaprture for Antigua, 'Fanny's relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins', but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and [knight's move] she really grieved Later on, he talks about the humorous knight's moves as a 'special dimple' such as "Lady Bertram was a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needle-work, =of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children..."

Sherwood Smith