A Jane Austen Education(23)
But at fifteen, “appearances were mending.” Catherine began to curl her hair, long to dance, read love poems, and wear pretty clothes. Her looks improved, and by seventeen she had become an attractive girl. But one thing was missing: her little country neighborhood afforded no young men to arouse her heart. At last, her moment came when she was taken on holiday to Bath, the most fashionable resort in England—a town of theaters and balls, shopping and gossip, grand houses and beautiful views, a place to see and be seen, and the Austen family’s favorite vacation spot. Just as the Austens used to stay with Jane’s rich aunt and uncle, who went so he could “take the waters” for his gout, Catherine accompanied her neighbors the Allens, the wealthiest family in the district, who went for the same reason.
In Bath, Catherine fell in with two pairs of siblings, each of whom decided to take her in hand and teach her, in very different ways, about life. One pair was John and Isabella Thorpe, vain and knowing young people who stuffed Catherine’s head full of false ideas. John was the kind of garrulous, shallow young man that people in Austen’s day referred to as a “rattle”:I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness. . . . Miss Morland; do but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life? . . . Such true blood! . . .
Look at his forehand; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour: tie his legs and he will get on.
John was clearly a fool, but Catherine was so green, and John was so impressed with himself—she listened to his palaver “with all the civility and deference of the youthful female mind, fearful of hazarding an opinion of its own in opposition to that of a self-assured man”—that she couldn’t help letting herself be taken in.
John, however, was nothing compared to Isabella. He was merely silly; she was selfish, hypocritical, and cunning. (“‘This is my favourite place,’ said she as they sat down on a bench between the doors, which commanded a tolerable view of everybody entering at either; ‘it is so out of the way.’”) Isabella, four years older than Catherine, introduced her protégée to all the arts of insincerity: how to flirt, how to lie, how to be a tease. Manipulating her new friend for John’s benefit, she did everything she could to throw Catherine into her brother’s arms. When John offered to take the heroine out alone for a drive, a highly improper suggestion in those days, his sister chimed in as if on cue. “‘How delightful that will be!’ cried Isabella, turning round. ‘My dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will not have room for a third.’”
Some of the worst parts of Isabella’s influence came from the kind of books to which she introduced her younger friend. Northanger Abbey was a satire of the gothic fiction so popular in Austen’s day—the exact same stuff she had taken off so raucously in her juvenile sketches. The name was a parody of highflown titles like The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Castle of Otranto. (Northanger would have been the equivalent of something like New Jersey.) Austen herself must have loved those books, in a perverse, guilty-pleasure sort of way. She could never have lampooned them as brilliantly as she did if she hadn’t been reading them by the bucketful—and you don’t keep reading what you simply despise. But the joke on Catherine was that she believed what she read. Like Isabella’s artificial behavior, the extravagant stories of wicked noblemen and haunted castles that the two girls read together—and that Catherine, at least, was innocent enough to take as realistic—gave the heroine all the wrong ideas about the world.
Yet it wasn’t just the Thorpes. Catherine’s whole environment—a world of polite falsehoods, faked emotions, and empty social rituals—conspired to miseducate her. The night of their arrival in Bath, Mrs. Allen took her young ward to a ball, but since they failed to run into anyone they knew, Catherine was forced to remain without a partner:“How uncomfortable it is,” whispered Catherine, “not to have a single acquaintance here!”
“Yes, my dear,” replied Mrs. Allen, with perfect serenity, “it is very uncomfortable indeed.”
James, Catherine’s older brother and John Thorpe’s friend from college, showed up in town in time to hear his sister gush about how impressed she was with Isabella. “I am very glad to hear you say so,” he responded, having been taken in by her as thoroughly as Catherine had, “she is just the kind of young woman I could wish to see you attached to; she has so much good sense, and is so thoroughly unaffected and amiable.” Catherine didn’t seem to stand a chance amid this company, and she was soon aping the people around her without even realizing it. Mr. Allen came to collect his wife and charge at the end of that first, disappointing evening:“Well, Miss Morland,” said he, directly, “I hope you have had an agreeable ball.”
“Very agreeable indeed,” she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.
Fortunately, Catherine was also befriended by a second brother and sister, Henry and Eleanor Tilney. Henry, who like Isabella Thorpe was a good bit older than the heroine, went about educating her in a completely different way. Clever and animated, he was also so quirky and silly that Catherine did not know what to make of him initially. This was their very first dialogue, after they’d been dancing with each other for a little while:“I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”