by Helena Kelly
Among Catherine’s earliest introductions to reading were The Beggar’s Petition and The Hare and Many Friends, a version of one of Aesop’s fables. The Hare and Many Friends, with its combination of anthropomorphism and danger, and its suggestion of moral failings in the older generation, seems to have appealed quite strongly to Catherine who, we’re told, learned it ‘as quickly as any child in England’. The Beggar’s Petition, though, is, to the modern mind, a very odd choice of reading (and of learning by heart) for a small child. It deals with uncomfortable subjects: war, enclosure, abuse of power, the kind of subjects which – wrongly – we consider distant from Jane’s novels.
Sir Charles Grandison features a young heiress kidnapped by the villainous (and extravagantly-named) Sir Hargrave Pollexfen. She’s eventually rescued by the heroic Sir Charles Grandison, dully virtuous except in the small matter of his engagement to a mentally unstable Italian Catholic. Catherine’s history reading seems to have been concentrated largely in the middle ages, perhaps stretching as far as the Tudors. We can’t be certain which plays and poems she’s read, but we’re told specifically which ones she can quote (or misquote) from: Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, by Alexander Pope; Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard; James Thompson’s The Seasons; and three Shakespeare plays – Othello, Measure for Measure, and Twelfth Night.
It’s just as much these texts that Catherine is ‘judging from’ as her incomplete, uncomprehending reading of Udolpho. The wider literary climate, the texts which are accepted reading, do as much to influence Catherine’s ideas as Mrs Radcliffe does.
When Catherine is first beginning to give way to her extravagant suspicions of General Tilney, she compares him to Montoni, but also to the people she’s read about in history books: ‘many instances of beings equally hardened in guilt might […] be produced. She could remember dozens who had persevered in every possible vice, murdering whomsoever they chose, without any feeling of humanity or remorse; till a violent death, or a religious retirement closed their black career.’ Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, with its ‘ghost’ and corpse left unburied, practically qualifies as Gothic. We’re informed that Catherine has ‘read too much not to be perfectly aware of the ease with which a waxen figure might be introduced, and a suppositious funeral carried on’. If she ever ventured further in her Shakespeare, she would have encountered plenty of ‘suppositious funerals’, plenty of characters whose deaths are faked – Juliet, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Imogen in Cymbeline, Hermione in A Winter’s Tale, who, towards the end of the play, appears disguised as a statue of herself. Catherine may have read Lewis Theobald’s The Fatal Secret, an eighteenth-century reworking of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi with a happy ending in which the Duchess is hidden safely away, and her would-be murderous brother deceived by ‘a waxen image’. Both history and drama will have furnished her with husbands who succeed in murdering their wives – Othello, Iago, Henry VIII.
There are plenty of cultural sources for Catherine’s wilder imaginings besides Gothic novels.
And actually, Archbishop Whateley, an early reviewer of Northanger Abbey, makes almost exactly this point in his review of the book, that it’s foolish for parents to ban novels while allowing uncontrolled access to other forms of literature:
[…] we are acquainted with a careful mother whose daughters, while they never in their lives read a novel of any kind, are permitted to peruse, without reserve, any plays that happen to fall in their way; and with another, from whom no lessons, however excellent, of wisdom and piety, contained in a prose-fiction, can obtain quarter; but who, on the other hand, is no less indiscriminately indulgent to her children in the article of tales in verse, of whatever character […]
Catherine’s ‘indulgence’ in Udolpho is only the match to a pile of literary and cultural fuel; what burns, what drives her behaviour, are half-remembered episodes from English history, Shakespeare’s plays, anti-Catholicism. The chest and cabinet she nerves herself to throw open, searching for secrets, glance towards the novel in which William Godwin – perhaps the most radical of the 1790s radicals – laid bare the state of ‘things as they are’. There are stronger, more deeply-rooted forces drawing Catherine towards Mrs Tilney’s bedroom than a few pages of a novel, or a copper-plate illustration.
We’ve been skirting round these bedroom scenes for quite long enough; it’s time to get to grips with them.
One of the central characters in David Lodge’s series of campus novels is an American academic, Morris Zapp. Zapp works on Jane Austen. He aims to produce a completely exhaustive study of Jane’s novels. His teaching is supposedly ‘designed to shock … students out of a sloppily reverent attitude to literature’. But it becomes clear that he in fact just likes to shock. In one tutorial he reads aloud to his students ‘the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth lifted the little brat Walter off Anne Elliot’s shoulders’, dwelling on all the vaguely suggestive words before demanding, ‘If that isn’t an orgasm, what is it?’
The students are ‘flabbergasted’, and so is the reader. The more complicated bit of the joke is that this isn’t total nonsense. As we’ve seen, Jane isn’t a prude; nor were her contemporaries, the people she expected to read her work. But Zapp’s picked the wrong book. Of all Jane’s novels it’s not Persuasion but Northanger Abbey which comes closest to sexual explicitness.
Despite what the film adaptations would have you believe, we don’t often see Jane’s heroines in their nightgowns or their underwear. In Northanger Abbey, we do. Its three bedroom scenes are charged – entirely deliberately – with an erotic thrill. You don’t have to be Morris Zapp to find them sexy.
In the first, the half-dressed Catherine flings open the lid of a chest to find ‘a white cotton counterpane, properly folded’. A counterpane is a bed-cover – usually embroidered, often with quilt-work. It’s removed when the bed is in use. Jane invites us, here, to see the bed behind Catherine, ready for her to slip into, that night.
In the second scene, it is night. Catherine, we are to assume, has changed into nightwear. She is ‘beginning to think of stepping into bed, when, on giving a parting glance round the room, she was struck by the appearance of a high, old-fashioned black cabinet’. What she finds in the cabinet is a far cry from the ‘diamonds’ which Henry laughingly promised: petty accounts, a bill for treating a horse, and laundry lists, for a man, a list of a man’s clothes – ‘shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats’ – a list which conjures up the image of a naked male body.
And the passage which describes how she comes to find it is probably the sexiest thing you’ll read in Jane’s novels:
[…] she applied herself to the key, and after moving it in every possible way for some instants with the determined celerity of hope’s last effort, the door suddenly yielded to her hand: her heart leaped with exultation at such a victory, and having thrown open each folding door […] a double range of small drawers appeared in view, with some larger drawers above and below them; and in the centre, a small door, closed also with a lock and key, secured in all probability a cavity of importance.
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. […] The place in the middle alone remained now unexplored […] It was some time however before she could unfasten the door, the same difficulty occurring in the management of this inner lock as of the outer; 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 […]
Let’s not mince words here. With all those folds and cavities, the key, the fingers, the fluttering and trembling, this looks a
lot like a thinly veiled description of female masturbation.
And that’s not so extraordinary. Jane’s society viewed it as common knowledge that girls, as well as boys, indulged in the ‘secret and destructive vice’. Youthful female self-pleasuring was something to be worried about. A series of newspaper advertisements for Balm of Gilead, that late-eighteenth-century panacea for everything to do with your bits, mentions that the youth ‘of both sexes’ engaged in the practice.
The third bedroom scene is about sex too.
Catherine dreams of one day, perhaps, becoming ‘Mrs Tilney’. Part of her motivation for wanting to see Mrs Tilney’s room must be to imagine herself into the role of a married woman, to try out what it’s like to venture across that threshold. Indeed, Eleanor Tilney’s eagerness to show her mother’s room to Catherine hints at a not-unrelated desire to bring her prospective sister-in-law into proximity with the ‘mother’ she will never have a chance to know.
The first object to strike Catherine’s eye, when she finally does enter the room, is the bed. It’s ‘arranged as unoccupied’, with a counterpane (and perhaps bed-hangings) of ‘dimity’ – white cotton, with a pattern worked into the weave. The counterpane is similar, perhaps even identical, to the ‘white cotton counterpane’ which was removed from the bed in Catherine’s room and placed into the chest. Mrs Tilney’s room is flooded with daylight, the modern ‘Bath stove’ is ‘bright’. The wardrobes are made from ‘mahogany’, a wood which wasn’t much used in furniture-making until the eighteenth century; the chairs are ‘neatly painted’. The bed, too, one imagines, is modern. It’s not without history, though. This is the bed – one presumes – in which Mrs Tilney gave birth, and ‘lay in’ with her babies, perhaps where she breast-fed them. This is the bed in which she conceived her children. The counterpane hasn’t always lain smooth and flat. The bed-linen hasn’t always been white and unsullied.
Is country-bred Catherine, the fourth of ten children, ignorant of how babies come into the world? Surely not. She must have seen her own mother lying in, a new brother or sister in her arms, squashed and shrieking, the bloodied sheets being bundled downstairs. The Morlands’ country vicarage may be far less Gothic than an abbey, but it’s had its own, temporary torture chamber at times, and Catherine will have heard the screams.
For those who wonder, endlessly, why Jane never married, there’s a reason right here. Mrs Tilney’s room – the only marital bedroom Jane ever shows us in detail – is associated, indelibly, with death. Not only is this the room in which, as we’re told, Mrs Tilney died, it’s a room haunted by the ghosts of literature, by the dead Marchioness’ suite at the Chateau-le-Blanc; by Blue Beard’s chamber, filled with the corpses of his dead wives.
It’s haunted not just by dead women, but by women who’ve been murdered by their husbands.
Catherine, shamed at being caught outside Mrs Tilney’s room, humiliated by the scolding she receives from Henry, disowns her suspicions of General Tilney. As we’ve seen, she blames Gothic novels alone for sending her imagination haywire, and not any of the more enduring cultural patterns and ideas she has been exposed to:
Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. 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. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.
What Catherine’s surely forgetting here is that a husband doesn’t need sleeping potions to effectively immobilise his wife, and nor does he necessarily require poison to kill her. Rhubarb was used as a purgative and, in high enough doses, could affect a pregnancy. Pregnant women are still warned against drinking herbal teas containing rhubarb leaves. Is it coincidence that, of all the products a ‘druggist’ might sell, Jane chooses to mention rhubarb, that she reminds us of pregnancy, and the possibility that it might be unwanted, in this sentence, in the context of husbands killing their wives?
Henry asserts that his mother died from what he calls ‘bilious fever’, a ‘malady … from which she had often suffered … its cause therefore constitutional’. It’s a catch-all term; used to cover everything from cholera and yellow fever to common-or-garden stomach upsets. Jane’s mother and several of her brothers suffered periodically from bilious complaints. An acquaintance, a young woman called Marianne Mapleton, died of her bilious fever.
But ‘bilious’ symptoms are vomiting, abdominal pain, constipation and diarrhoea; these are also signs of pregnancy, and of the early stages of labour or of miscarriage. Mrs Tilney, at the time of her death, would still have been of child-bearing age. The ‘physician’ who first attends her is ‘one in whom she had always placed great confidence’ – one who helped her in her earlier confinements, perhaps. Two others are called in; to do what? Mrs Tilney clearly isn’t suffering from cholera or yellow fever, because her sons are permitted to see her. The treatment for the less dramatic bilious fevers was to bleed the patient and wait. But in cases of pregnancy and labour there were different approaches and treatments to try. We ought to consider the possibility that Jane’s first readers might well have considered – that what Henry is unwittingly describing here is a miscarriage or disastrously mismanaged early labour, that Mrs Tilney’s ‘constitutional’ tendency to biliousness is in fact a series of pregnancies and miscarriages.
Why, after all, does General Tilney ‘not love’ his wife’s ‘favourite walk’? Why is he unwilling to allow his daughter to show Catherine into his wife’s room? Does he have a guilty conscience? Well, yes, perhaps.
This, in the end, is the mystery, the terrifying secret at the heart of Northanger Abbey. If we laughed at the hilarious notion of Catherine’s mother dying during one of her ten pregnancies and labours, then this is where we should stop laughing; sex can kill you. All of Jane’s heroines – all of the women in her novels who marry – are taking a terrifying risk. They’re placing their lives, potentially, in the hands of their husbands.
Catherine, Jane tells us, abandons the ‘alarms of romance’ for the ‘anxieties of common life’. It’s probably going to be a while before she’ll be able to enjoy the ‘alarms of romance’ again, but we can only hope that she carries on reading novels, that she keeps up a library subscription. There may come a time when the anxieties of common life – pregnancy, childbirth – begin to seem far more threatening than the nightmares conjured up by Mrs Radcliffe. Catherine might learn to value a library more for the medicines it sells – the Balm of Gilead, the ‘female pills’ that promise to ‘restore’ the menstrual cycle – than for mere novels.
Footnotes
a Based on Jane Austen’s letters to Cassandra Austen (11th June and 19th June 1799).
b The issue is complicated by the survival among Jane’s papers of a (very) short novel-in-letters focusing on the shockingly immoral behaviour of a character named Lady Susan Vernon and usually referred to as Lady Susan, though the title isn’t Jane’s. This survives copied onto paper which bears an 1805 watermark. There’s also a short fragment of writing about a young girl called Catherine. The first isn’t long enough to fill even half a volume, let alone two, while the second is not much more than a very tentative first sketch of an opening. Unless we start inventing manuscripts from nowhere, then, the safest hypothesis is that Susan, ‘Miss Catherine’ and Northanger Abbey are essentially one and the same text. As we’ll see, nearly all the incidental detail in Northanger Abbey points to it having been written in the late 1790s or the first couple of years of the nineteenth century, strengthening the supposition that it is Susan. The identifica
tion remains hypothesis, however, rather than fact.
c The story recounted in the family memoirs that Henry bought it back before taunting the publisher with the fact that the author had also written Pride and Prejudice seems terribly neat; possibly too neat to be true.
d The best-selling author of the day, Maria Edgeworth (who we’ll encounter briefly in the chapter on Emma), had 21 siblings and half-siblings. The Duchess of Leinster, mother of the Irish rebel leader Lord Edward Fitzgerald, gave birth 22 times.
e For example, in June 1799, when Jane was in Bath, the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette was running adverts for ‘nipple liniment’.
f Lord Ellenborough’s Act also altered the law on infanticide, which previously automatically assumed that the mother of an illegitimate newborn baby found dead had murdered it.
g Britain’s largest chain of chemists, Boots, ran lending libraries in many of their stores until the middle of the twentieth century.
h It seems probable that Mary Musgrove is pregnant during the main action of Persuasion. She likes to coddle herself, but the younger of her two sons is two years old, a very usual age-gap, and we’re told that she is ‘indisposed’ and expects ‘that she should not have a day’s health all the autumn’.
i Consumption was a leading cause of death, but as we’ll see later, there could be reasons to mistrust some of the assertions made about these two deaths.