A Jane Austen Education(27)

All this chimed with something that my professor had been trying to teach me ever since I had first encountered him, though he had never come right out and said it. One of the most shocking things about his courses was what they didn’t involve. The rituals of the graduate seminar, all of them devised to turn us into professional scholars, were entirely absent. No lists of secondary sources or packets of supplemental reading, no theoretical frameworks or critical jargon. No seminar papers, either, even though they were supposed to be the principal means by which we received our training: twenty-page essays, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, our first baby steps in writing for professional publication. Instead, he simply wanted us to write a one-page paper every week. One page, with no citations and no outside reading. Just you and the book and one of those fiendishly simple questions he liked to ask.

Literary study, he was trying to tell us, was not about learning a secret language or mastering a bag of theoretical tricks. It was not about inventing a new, professional personality, either. It was about getting back in touch with the ways we used to read—the ways people read when they’re reading for fun—but also about intensifying them, making them more thoughtful and deeply informed. “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” It was about trusting our responses, but examining them, too.

Feelings are also the primary way we know about novels—which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices. Our feelings are what novelists work with, the colors on their palette. What was it if not my feelings that Austen had been working with in Emma, when she taught me about boredom, or Pride and Prejudice, when she taught me about certainty? Curiosity, perplexity, exhilaration; the buzz in the brain, the tumult in the soul—that, my professor was telling me, was what I had to work with; that was where my scholarship should start. With the love of reading that had gotten me to graduate school in the first place.




The ways we used to read. One of the things that Northanger Abbey taught me, one of the things that both my professor and Austen understood, is how hard it is to see what’s right in front of us, even when we think we’re looking. Catherine was not uneducated before Henry got to her; she was something worse: thanks to Isabella and Mrs. Allen and everyone else, she was miseducated.

That was the point of the scene on Beechen Cliff, Henry’s own moment as a bad teacher. There, Catherine really did begin in a state of ignorance, uneducated (“She knew nothing of drawing—nothing of taste”), and by the time her teacher was done, she couldn’t see a thing. She could see foregrounds and distances and second distances, side-screens, perspectives, lights, and shades—everything the theory of the picturesque told her she was supposed to see—but she missed the entire city of Bath, couldn’t recognize what might be beautiful about it.

That was just a warm-up, though, for the heroine’s visit, later in the novel, to Northanger Abbey itself, the Tilney family’s rambling old Gothic estate. Having read all those novels with Isabella—The Castle of Wolfenbach and The Necromancer of the Black Forest, Horrid Mysteries and The Midnight Bell—Catherine thought she knew what she was going to find there. Sure enough, alone in her room on her first, blustery night, nerves on edge for every sign of a secret door, every sound of a creaking board or rattling chain, she came upon a strange old cabinet that looked like just the kind of thing to conceal a few horrid mysteries of its own: Catherine’s heart beat quick, but her courage did not fail her. With a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity, her fingers grasped the handle of a drawer and drew it forth. It was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she seized a second, a third, a fourth; each was equally empty. . . . The place in the middle alone remained now unexplored. . . . It was some time however before she could unfasten the door . . . but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript.





A dark house, a stormy night, a cryptic roll of paper—all her expectations seemed to be coming true:The manuscript so wonderfully found, . . . how was it to be accounted for? What could it contain? To whom could it relate? By what means could it have been so long concealed? And how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it! Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? No, they did not. The precious manuscript turned out to be nothing other than—a laundry list.





And that was only the beginning. One dose of reality was not enough to cure Catherine of her imaginative projections, and before she knew it, she had concocted an elaborate fantasy about buried secrets and violent crimes in the Tilney household. In fact, something scary truly was going on at Northanger Abbey—Catherine was right to detect a dark cloud hanging over the family—but the violence was emotional, not physical. Catherine missed it—until, before long, she was blindsided by it—because she was looking, all too zealously, in the wrong direction. Her fantasies were not just foolish, they were dangerous. Long passageways and old cabinets notwithstanding, there really was nothing remotely mysterious about Northanger Abbey. The only thing separating Catherine from the truth was her own mind.