1. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Terror
Clothing the in the Abbey
Ladies and gentlemen, the author and the novel I am going to make a brief report on today are Jane Austen and her Northanger Abbey, which is sometimes categorized in the genre of gothic novel, yet some other times, “gothic parody,” if it forms a genre of its own. The critical perspective I am taking in today’s reading can be tentatively placed under the title of “clothing the terror in the abbey,” from which I attempt to demonstrate that both the fashionable clothes and the gothic abbey haunted by terrible mysteries, that is, the object materials from which we project our subjective and imaginative ideal beauty and unspeakable terror, are mere the signs or the signifiers, but not the ultimate beauty and terror themselves. A novel which satires a girl’s conflation of the real abbey with the abbey read from the gothic tales, that is, a girl who always mistakes the signifiers for the real, thus can be read as a moral teaching, conveying the significance of critical reading. As you can see, the main argument I am going to develop today is the differentiation of the signifiers from the signified with a view to awakening people including myself from fetishism or the material world. Some keywords like clothes, words, or the abbey thus will be frequently mentioned in the following as metaphors signifying the social status, thought, or the terror. To begin, my report will first of all introduce Austen’s life and works, followed by the novel Northanger Abbey, and then I will make a brief report on the critical readings I have read about the novel Northanger Abbey. Finally, for fear of being misguided by the critical readings “about” the novel, we will read several key passages of the novel together to see how our understanding of the novel can be different from each other.
Done by Laurie Jui-hua Tseng
April 25, 2006

2. Austen’s Life and Works
Having Six brothers and one sister
Remaining single for life
Receiving education briefly from
Major works:
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1816)
Northanger Abbey (1817;
posthumous)
Persuasion (1817; posthumous)
Austen’s life:
The shown picture of Jane Austen’s portrait is a sketch drawn by her sister Cassandra.
The "Cottage" down below is now a museum open to the public, where Jane Austen lived the last 8 years of her life in Chawton.
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, in She lived in the area for most of her life and never married. She had six brothers and one older sister, Cassandra, to whom she was very close. In 1783, she was educated briefly by a relative in Oxford, then in Southampton. In 1785–1786, she was educated at the Reading Ladies boarding school in the Abbey gatehouse in Reading, Berkshire. In general, she received an education superior to that generally given to girls of her time, and took early to writing, beginning her first tale in 1789.
Austen’s works:
Adhering to contemporary convention for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously. Her novels achieved a measure of popular success and esteem yet her anonymity kept her out of leading literary circles. Although all her works are love stories and although her career coincided with the Romantic movement in English literature, Jane Austen was no Romantic. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel and the young woman who exercises rational moderation is more likely to find real happiness than one who elopes with a lover. Her major works include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

3. The Plot Summary of Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is the story of a young woman, Catherine Morland, who is invited to Bath with family friends, the Allens, for the waters at Bath will help Mr. Allen's gout. Catherine (called "Cathy" by her many younger siblings) has been quite sheltered all her life, escaping only by reading Gothic novels, and so is delighted to go to Bath.
Mrs. Allen introduce Catherine to the Thorpe family, including an older girl, Isabella, who befriends Catherine. The girls have bonded over their love of similar novels, when their brothers arrive. James (Catherine's brother) falls in love with Isabella, a hardened flirt. Likewise, John (Isabella's brother and James's friend) goes after Catherine, who does not like John half so much as John likes himself.
Catherine is in love herself, however, with a quirky young minister, Henry Tilney, whom she met at a dance. Catherine befriends Henry's sister, Eleanor, and goes on many outing with the two siblings, after their brother, Frederick, comes to Bath.
Isabella, having learned that James (to whom she is now engaged) is poor, begins to flirt with Frederick Tilney.
Generally speaking, Northanger Abbey is a Jane Austen story about love, marriage, and heritage among three pairs of siblings, the Morlands, the Thropes, and the Tilneys, which ends with the happy union of the heroine Catherine Morland and the hero Henry Tilney. In the following, I will just read out the summary word by word as you may read them on the screen.

4. The Plot Summary of Northanger Abbey
Eleanor invites Catherine to stay with her at the Tilney's home, Northanger Abbey; Catherine accepts with pleasure, though/because she imagines that the Abbey will be rather like the gloomy castles in her books.
Catherine is, at first, welcomed by General Tilney (Henry's father), who has been bragged to by John Thorpe that Catherine (whom John thinks is in love with him) is an heiress. When he realizes that Catherine is not rich, however, he sends her packing.
Back at home, Catherine is unhappy, missing Henry and disillusioned about her precious Gothic novels (because the real Abbey proves to be modern and domestic, unlike what she has read in the novels). Henry appears and propses, however, and the story ends happily.
To present the story of Catherine’s growth from a naïve young girl to her enlightenment in a more accessible way, in the following we will see Brock’s illustrations of Northanger Abbey done about a hundred years ago.

5. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
The picture on the left, marked by “Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl,” is the sentiment articulated by her parents when they found their daughter are getting prettier along the growth of her age at her juvenile. The right picture shows the awkwardness Catherine felt at the first party of her life. (When she first came to Bath, a place symbolizing the initiation of Catherine’s social life, and attended the party for the first time without a ready partner, she felt lost and awkward.

6. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
The picture on the left illustrates the two lades, Catherine and Isabella, walking arm in arm.
The picture on the right is John Thorpe, Isabella’s brother. According to the narrator’s depiction, “he was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.” In fact, not only is his looking unattractive, but his manner of talking is aggressive and egoistic.

7. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
These two picture of John Thorpe’s riding show clearly that he is a man of vulgar manner, coarse, and lack of concern with others, even when Catherine is screaming “I pray you to stop, Mr. Thorpe.”

8. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
The picture on the left is the scene when John Thorpe proposed to marry Catherine by saying “a famous good thing, this marrying scheme,” implying Isabella and James’s engagement could be their model, whereas in the picture on the right, we see Isabella, after finding James was not rich, flirting with Fredrick, Henry Tilney’s brother.

9. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
These two pictures are about Catherine in Northanger Abbey. The picture on the right shows how Catherine was shocked by the sudden coming up of Henry after she had an adventurous journey through the Abbey.

10. C. E. Brock’s Illustrations of Northanger Abbey
These two pictures show the ending of this novel when Henry visited Catherine in her hometown after she was sent back from the Abbey by Henry’s father.

11. Characters The Morland siblings (Catherine and James)
The Thorpe siblings (Isabella and John)
The Tilney siblings (Fredrick, Henry, and Eleanor)
Mrs. Allen
Since this story is about the triangle relationship among the three pairs of siblings, we will introduce the characters of this novel by family. First of all, the Morland siblings, being grown up in a plain, matter of fact family, are simple-minded and can see things merely from the surface. That’s why in the novel, we see how James was easily flirted and dropped by Isabella, and how Catherine had the illusions about the abbey after she read how they were depicted in gothic novels. As for the Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John, both they were practical and saw only interest in marriage. In their ways of talking, we thus can see them both dominated by the most immediate interests, without caring about the inconsistency of their logic. Compared with the former two pairs of siblings, Henry Tilney and Eleanor Tilney seemed to be much more well-educated and cultured no matter in the way of their talking or their value viewpoints. Finally, it is interesting to talk about the character of Mrs. Allen, Catherine’s chaperone in Bath. According to the narrator, she cares only about clothes, and talks only about clothes. Except this, she can’t notice or respond to anything serious. She takes all her opinions from her husband. In fact, for Austen, the interests in fashions and clothes are never bad things. According to Penelope Byrde’s research from Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra, the fashions, and even the needlework, are one the most frequently mentioned subjects. Austen’s critic on people with the character like Mrs. Allen’s is: she cannot look beyond the surface of the clothes. Besides those frivolous things, Austen hopes that we can form a critical criterion of our own, that is, in Lacan’s language, Austen’s concern is far beyond the imaginary stage. What she is concerned about, rather, is the symbolic order.

12. Theme The importance of critical reading in the following aspects:
The ephemerality of fashions
The fantastic illusions constituted in the gothic novels
The performativity of language use
From the above mentioned materials, we can thus form a tentative conclusion of this novel: it is a story conveying the importance of critical reading in the following aspects: the ephemerality of fashions, the fantastic illusions constituted in the gothic novels, and the performativity of language use. That is, this is a story warning us to differentiate the signifiers from the signified, or a story awakening people from their obsession with the surface of their lives. What is worth noting here is the point that it is the careless reading that is attacked in this novel, but not the act of reading itself. Anything wrong that can be picked up in Catherine’s reading of the gothic novels thus is never the fault of the novels, nor the abbey, but her folly of conflating the abbey real and the imagined. At this point, we may say that she is another Don Quixote who can not discriminate the real from the read. In reading Cervantes’s Don Quixote, we never criticize the act of reading, but the way of reading. In Catherine’s case, the problem thus is never what is written, but how it is read and interpreted by the reader.

13. Questions Raised: Is Northanger Abbey a gothic novel?
Does Jane Austen stand against paying attention to such “frivolous things” as clothes and novels?
My responses to the two frequently raised questions (“Is Northanger Abbey a gothic novel?” and “Does Jane Austen stand against paying attention to such frivolous things as clothes and novels?”) thus are: first, Northanger Abbey is not only a gothic novel, but a gothic parody, just like everything read is not only what it is, but also what it is not, and secondly, it is never the clothes and the novels (or the gothic genre) that are attacked or criticized by Jane Austen, but the careless way they are talked about. Clothes are never just the clothes. They are more than what they are. They are the signs. They are the language of social products. They are the emblem of the spirit of age.

14. Some Critical Readings of Northanger Abbey:
Jerinic’s “In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading Northanger Abbey”
McMaster’s “Clothing the Thought in the Word”
Justice’s “Northanger Abbey as Anti-Courtship Novel”
Clarke’s “Abbeys Real and Imagined”
Now, we will move on to some critical readings on the novel Northanger Abbey, which I guess may help me a lot to write the essay “Clothing the Terror in the Abbey.”
The first essay, Jerinic’s “In Defense of the Gothic: Rereading Northanger Abbey,” appears in a critical collection of Jane Austen’s works and feminism, entitled by “Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism,” edited by Devoney Looser. In this article, Jerinic’s argues that gothic novels are never the main target of Jane Austen’s charge; rather, as here I may quote from Jerinic from page 143, “reading in Udolpho is important because it removes one from the temptation of moral folly.” What is implied by Jerinic is: by reading gothic novels, readers can be trained to see things beyond their surface, since gothic novels are usually the fantastic counterpart of the realistic world, (which means if one can accept the fictional world of the gothic tales, he is ready to accept the fact that our world is never what it looks like).
The second article, McMaster’s “clothing the Thought in the Word,” appears in a Jane Austen periodical, “Persuasions.” In this article, the author attempts to draw an analogy between the clothes and the word in terms of their function as the indispensable vehicles to make, to mark, and to mask the abstract self-identity or the thought, which in our contemporary’s views are things that have never substantially existed. As you can see from my tentative title “clothing the terror in the abbey,” it is from McMaster’s inspiration that I have the idea of reading the abbey, a conventional gothic building, as the vehicle to convey one’s unspeakable terror.
The third article, Justice’s “Northanger Abbey as Anti-Courtship Novel,” also appears in the Jane Austen periodical Persuasions.” By redefining the word “courtship” from its etymology and having its semantic emphasis placed on “the pursuit of personal interest,” this article asserts that only an anti-courtship way of courtship, that is, what Kant says about the “disinterestedness” or “the purposiveness without purpose,” entails real happiness. Here, the Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John, are criticized for their priority giving to personal interest and wealth than to love and passion in marriage. In contrast, Catherine, though she was also criticized in some way in the novel, followed only her instinct, not interest, to pursue her happiness; and Henry, as a minister, concerned not wealth, but only the enlightenment of young lady he liked. In Justice’s conclusion, Northanger Abbey thus is a novel which tells not only the disillusion of the medieval romance courtship, but also the Kantian moral teaching, or the categorical imperative: happiness resides precisely in the pursuit or courtship of our desire; any calculation on the pursuit can only mislead us from our real happiness. Here, one of the famous quotations from the novel occurs to me to clarify the argument of Justice’s anti-courtship: the eve before the day when Catherine can see Henry for the second time in the party, Catherine seemed to have got lost or even disconcerted about what to wear for the party, but then she realized that “dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim” (54) and so she returned to tranquility.
Finally, in Clarke’s “Abbeys Real and Imagined,” an article also appearing in Persuasions, we have a perspective from an architectural historian’s point of view. In this article, Clarke does a comparative research on the abbeys really built and lived vs. the abbeys written in the gothic novels. According to him, real abbeys are usually for domestic or pragmatic use, so are usually light, airy, and cheerful, not like what people may read in the gothic novels. Besides, because the appropriation of the abbeys into domestic houses usually involve the show off of family pride and lineage, underlining the age and status of one’s family by providing a seat that put the visitor in mind of the medieval England to which you wished your family to be traced, the widespread use of armorial decoration, illustrating the feats of the ancestry, is often seen in the juxtaposition with the modern building. And it is based on Clarke’s comparative study of the abbeys real and imagined that I will develop my paper on the abbey as a signifier, signifying either the family pride or the terror or others, pending on the readers’ interpretations.

15. Key Passages from Northanger Abbey:
Isabella’s reading list of gothic novels
“Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction”
Henry and Catherine’s talk on “marriage vs. dancing”
Henry and Eleanor Tilney with Catherine Morland talking about gothic novels
Henry’s gothic parody
“The visions of romance were over” (Catherine’s enlightenment)

16. Thanks for Your Attention