The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Azemia likewise satirizes sentimental and Gothic novels, but, unlike Modern Novel Writing, it is less a pastiche of stock scenes and sentiments than a throwback to the self-conscious comic novels of the 1750s. Azemia is the name of a Turkish harem girl who is kidnapped and taken by sea to England; while en route, she and a British seaman named Charles Arnold fall in love, but they are separated when they reach England, where Azemia is abducted again and passes through the hands of various conniving men and protective women until she is rescued 14 months later by Arnold, who marries her soon after. The novel purports to be the maiden effort of a young lady living in the Welsh boondocks whose knowledge of the world is limited to what she’s read in popular fiction. She often includes parenthetical asides to show how respectfully she’s following the example of other “novel-makers,” as in “The moon (which, in all the most celebrated novels lately published, shines every night in the most accommodating manner in the world) . . .” and “One day (to use the style, brief and simple, of an admirable novelist whom I am proud to imitate), the following conversation took place.”345 (Sorrentino again comes to mind, especially during the long alphabetical list of occupations in 2.7, which is where the denigrating “novel-makers” rather than “novelists” appears.) Miss Jenks inserts a long ghost story in the middle of the novel because “readers seem tired of all representations of actual life” (1.10), and though initially she resists writing the expected abduction scene after a masquerade (for “Nothing is so enchanting as novelty—from its name it must, of course, be the soul of a novel” [2.8]), she dutifully includes one later because it is “a circumstance which is hardly omitted in any novel since the confinement of Pamela at Mr. B―’s house in Lincolnshire, and the enlèvement of Miss Byron by Sir Hargrave Pollexfen” (2.11)—one of several digs at Richardson for starting this whole sentimental trend. (Beckford has kinder things to say about Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and the authors of Martinus Scriblerus.) There are fewer passages lifted from bad novels than in Modern Novel Writing, though Beckford finds other ways to insult their authors. Once again, Robinson, Hawke, and Radcliffe feel the lash of satire, as do Frances Burney (whose pompous preface to Camilla is parodied in Beckford’s “Exordium Extraordinary”), Seward’s Louisa, Williams’s Julia, Susannah Gunning’s Memoirs of Mary (1793), and especially a Fielding-wannabe named Richard Cumberland, author of a Tom Jones knockoff called Henry (1795). Quite a few poets and other writers of the period are roasted as well.346 After concluding her novel by advertising for a husband (“some tender yet sensible youth who would be content with rural felicity in an elegant cottage in Wales”), Miss Jenks adds a letter to reviewers, not only to explain how she wrote her novel, but also to furnish examples of the reviews she hopes to receive, each a parody of the style of the leading journals of the day.

  When Beckford reprinted the novel in 1798, he changed the subtitle of Azemia to a Novel Containing Imitations of the Manner, Both in Prose and Verse, of Many of the Authors of the Present Day, with Political Strictures. These “political strictures” are much more pronounced in Azemia than in its predecessor, and are, his modern editor suggests, the main reason Beckford wrote it: “An astute observer of the shifting trends in Europe and England, Beckford perceived the rage for sentimental romances in his own country as absurdly escapist at a time when reason and common sense were called for to address the hard realities of war, poverty and political oppression that were traumatizing England in the 1790s” (viii). In this regard, Azemia recalls satirical novels of the 1730s such as Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century and Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai, with their stinging attacks on Walpole transfered to Pitt. Even Voltaire occasionally comes to mind. While brilliantly demonstrating how bad novels are written, Beckford managed to write a rather good one, certainly one that can be read today with greater pleasure and enlightenment than any of the novels he mocks. They are deservedly forgotten; Azemia deserves to be rediscovered.

  The finest critifiction of this period was written by a young woman later credited with leading the British novel out of the wilderness of mediocrity: Jane Austen (1775–1817). Though not published until 1817, Northanger Abbey was mostly written in 1798 and 1799 in response to the novels of the 1790s, so it makes a fitting close to this chapter.347 Even as a teenager, Austen knew the commercial fiction of her day was ludicrous; at age 15 she wrote an epistolary novella misspelled Love and Freindship that, like Beckford’s Modern Novel Writing, satirizes sentimental fiction by exposing its clichéd plots, theatrical gestures, and its overwrought diction—what the adult Austen called “novel slang.”348 “Base miscreant!” cries its heroine, “how canst thou thus undauntedly endeavour to sully the spotless reputation of such bright excellence?”349 Most of her juvenilia consists of parodies (not imitations) of pop fiction, and when she began writing Northanger Abbey at age 23, she set out not only to satirize Gothic thrillers but to offer a primer on how to write a realistic romance novel. As Austen walks us through the story of how an average 17-year-old meets her future husband and, after the usual misunderstandings and obstacles, marries him on the final page, she redefines what a fictional heroine should be by noting what she is not. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine,” the novel begins, and Austen continues to distinguish her from her elder sisters in fiction: her father was not a distressed clergyman, was not handsome, “and was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.” Her mother did not die during childbirth, Catherine was not beautiful and talented as a girl (was in fact a rambunctious tomboy), and is not particularly bright. Not your stereotypical heroine then, though inadvertently “from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine” by reading. She’s now at the stereotypical age when a heroine meets her hero, but standard-issue romance heroes are scarce in the Morlands’ rural neighborhood: “There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. . . .” The narrator wryly comments “Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way,” and thus sends Catherine and some family friends to Bath, which most British novel heroines seem to visit during their storybook careers.

  There she meets her future husband, a 26-year-old clergyman named Henry Tilney, who is as unlike the stereotypical romance protagonist as Catherine is. Witty, casual, open-minded (and familiar enough with ladies’ fashions that one initially suspects he’s gay), Tilney represents a new kind of fictional hero, for he falls for Catherine not because of her peerless beauty, immense wealth, or virtuous concealment of her feelings for him—for “a celebrated writer” (Richardson) insists “that no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared” (1.3). Instead, the narrator tells us at the end, “his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge,” the narrator apologizes tongue-in-cheekily, “and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own” (2.15).

  Like Fielding—whose fiction was too coarse for her taste, hence the belittling allusion to Tom Jones earlier (“a boy accidentally found at their door”)—Austen was self-consciously creating a “new species of writing” with a new species of character, taken from “common life” rather than from the pages of older novels. After “chatting some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them” (1.3, my italics), Tilney jokingly pretends to converse with Catherine in the stiffly unnatural style of a romance hero, and throughout the novel Austen opposes the heroic and unnatural with the common and natural. “Feelings rather natural than heroic possessed” (1.12) Catherine until she meets a 21-year-old airhead named Isabella Thorpe, who introduces her to the Gothic novel at Bath. After Catherine finishes Radclif
fe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, she suggests they read The Italian together, and hands Catherine a list of seven more Gothic titles worth reading,350 which she assures her credulous friend are all wonderfully “horrid.” (Isabella uses the same adjective to describe Sir Charles Grandison, but in a negative way.) As though under the influence of a drug, Catherine’s vision is distorted by these perfervid novels, so when she has the opportunity to visit Henry’s home at Northanger Abbey, she thrills to the idea of a haunted castle “just like what one reads about.” On the way there, he teases her about the Gothic trappings she apparently expects to see, describing the typical contents of a Gothic novel so accurately that Catherine metafictionally exclaims, “This is just like a book!” (2.5). Once there, she begins obsessing and acting like a Gothic heroine, suspecting Henry’s father of murdering his wife, until Henry sets her straight with a lecture like those given to the book-deluded heroines of The Mock Clelia and The Female Quixote.351 “The anxieties of common life began soon to succeed to the alarms of romance” (2.10), and in that simple statement Jane Austen set the agenda for the modern novel, bidding farewell to premodern fiction and making a historic course correction that most literary novelists have followed ever since.

  Again like Fielding, Austen frequently comments on her protagonist’s progress and discusses “the rules of composition” (2.16) governing romance novels, each time kicking them to the curb. Introducing the permissive family friend with whom Catherine travels to Bath, the narrator sarcastically describes how, contrary to guardians in old-fashioned novels, she will not act in her new-fashioned one: “It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable—whether by her imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy—whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character, or turning her out of doors” (1.2). The narrator is content with a thumbnail sketch of Isabella Thorpe’s family, mocking earlier novelists’ tendency (like Lee in The Recess) to elaborate needlessly: “This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters, in which the worthlessness of lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which has passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated” (1.4). When the narrative reaches the point a few pages from the end when the future of Catherine and Henry’s marriage depends on the permission of the latter’s father, the narrator jokes about the lack of suspense, for we all know how this game is played: “The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity” (2.16).352

  This is a novel about reading the world as well as novels, addressed to novel-readers; and just as Tilney advises Catherine to analyze events not by way of bad novels but by “consult[ing] your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you” (2.10), Austen hopes her readers will abandon silly, misleading fiction for the more intelligent, reliable type that she wrote, which is based on the probable and on sharp observation of what was passing around her. Characters in Northanger Abbey can be judged not only by the novels they read, but by how and why they read them: Isabella reads Gothic novels for cheap thrills, while Catherine takes them too literally. Even after Tilney’s lecture, she allows that while Gothic thrillers don’t accurately represent life in central England, “Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented” (2.10). Isabella’s doltish brother John boasts “I never read novels; I have something else to do,” adding: “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day, but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation” (1.7). As though in response, Tilney asserts, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid” (1.14). He has read far more novels than Catherine has, including a suspicious amount of women’s fiction—“Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas”—and it is implied that he can not only distinguish the good from the bad (including Radcliffe’s thrillers, which are certainly better than those of her imitators), but that he reads for aesthetic “pleasure”—not for cheap thrills, not for literal reports of malevolence in the world, nor for sexual titillation (which is apparently John’s motive). A reader who begins Northanger Abbey with the expectations of a Catherine or Isabella should finish it with the informed appreciation of a Tilney—or so Austen hoped—and an appreciation not only of Northanger Abbey but of good novels in general.

  Unlike Beckford, who didn’t have a stake in the novel and thus was content to mock it from the sidelines, Austen wanted to correct it and defend it from detractors. Writing was her vocation, her life, and she resented the insulting condescension shown to novels by reviewers and even by some fellow novelists. (Austen owned a copy of Bage’s Hermsprong, in which a character who is reluctantly thinking of writing a novel says “novels are now pretty generally considered as the lowest of all human productions” [1.14].) This is the motive behind the most famous passage in Northanger Abbey, a superb defense of the novel as a major art form, and a stinging attack on those who denigrate it in favor of tenth-rate nonfiction and secondhand anthologies. Austen limits her examples of good fiction to the novels a “young lady” might read, but her defense is a St. Crispin’s Day celebration of what the best British novelists had accomplished by the end of the 18th century. On rainy days, Catherine and Isabella read novels together:

  Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of The History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge
of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (5)