Austen's Misreaders*

*characters, not critics

Cervantes declares war on romances of chivalry and generates the first novel out of his playful but full-throated antipathy toward them. At the end of Don Quixote Part II the dying hero declares himself the enemy of the books he used to be obsessed with:

all the histories of knight-errantry are to me odious and profane: I am now sensible of my folly, and of the danger I was led into by reading them; and now, through the mercy of God, and my own dear-bought experience, I detest and abhor them.

Part II of Quixote was published in 1615. Over the following centuries, as the novel genre evolves, what the hero (or heroine) reads still matters, but the circumstances in which the reading takes place and how judicious and adequate that reading is begins to take on greater importance. This subtly shifts the focus away from the external stimuli—the books being read—and towards the protagonist’s education, milieu, and individual proclivities and vices.

Quixote is already a thoroughly modern work, set in a post-Gutenberg world of multiplying books. But when the local priest and the barber try to intervene to cure Quixote early in Book I, they simply go about destroying his library, saving only the few volumes that they judge to be of redeeming artistic and moral value. By contrast, in a nineteenth-century bourgeois society in which novels are not only widely available but also increasingly exempt from the social stigma that once hung over them, figuring out the right way to approach works of fiction becomes a much trickier undertaking, requiring a subtle balance between, on the one hand, recognizing the enjoyment to be had from reading the latest bestseller and, on the other, acknowledging the dangers of exposing impressionable young minds to certain kinds of novels, especially in high doses.

Written almost two hundred years after Quixote, Austen’s Northanger Abbey is, on the surface, a satire of Gothic fiction in the same way Quixote is a satire of romances of chivalry. Under the influence of books with titles like Horrid Mysteries and Necromancer of the Black Forest, protagonist Catherine Morland allows her imagination to run wild and reveals to Henry Tilney, the scion of Northanger Abbey, her dark fears about his late mother’s death: Catherine suspects that Mrs. Tilney may have been murdered by her husband, Henry’s father General Tilney. Thoroughly shocked, Henry reprimands her for her “dreadful” surmise and Catherine, realizing that she has allowed herself to become carried away, runs to her room weeping “tears of shame.” Chapter ten begins: “The visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. […] Her folly” now seemed “even criminal.” And a paragraph later:

She saw that the infatuation had been created, the mischief settled long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged.

It was in Bath that she and her friend Isabella Thorpe went on a Gothic novel binge. (“Dear creature!” exclaimed Isabella upon learning that Catherine was tearing through The Mysteries of Udolpho. “How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”)

It’s clear that Austen thinks that both Isabella and Gothic fiction are a bad “influence” on Catherine. But the solution is not a bonfire. Austen is after something more interesting than a simplistic interdiction of or warning against “that sort of reading.” In the very same work where Catherine’s misguided suspicions are supercharged by reading genre fiction, Henry Tilney, the character who comes closest to embodying the book’s moral and intellectual center, praises Ann Radcliffe and her chilling Mysteries of Udolpho:

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”

And Austen herself, in her “defense of the novel” at the conclusion of Chapter 5, writes: “our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world.” She mentions by name the masterpieces of Burney and other realist writers who influenced her directly but she does not exclude the likes of Gothic novelist Radcliffe, using the same word—“pleasure”—to praise novels generally that Henry does to praise Radcliffe specifically.

Moreover, by the conclusion of Northanger Abbey we learn that, while Catherine may have been wrong to suspect General Tilney of murdering his wife, in other respects her intuitions about him were accurate. He’s not a murderer but he is, as the critic Rachel Brownstein puts it, “evil in a commonplace way—a greedy, scheming, rude social climber.”

For Austen the problem is not so much that Catherine has been reading Gothic fiction as that her reading habits aren’t broad and varied enough. “It is a most interesting work,” says Henry of The Mysteries of Udolpho. “You are fond of that kind of reading?” She replies: “To say the truth, I do not much like any other.” Catherine doesn’t like reading history (he does) and admits that years of hearing her siblings struggling to read under her exhausted mother’s tutelage has made her liable to conflate instruction and torment.

And yet, despite having been led astray by her “over-indexing” on Gothic fiction, in a novel where other characters have a high opinion of General Tilney, she sees more clearly than the rest. Her humbling at the hands of Henry disabuses her of a melodramatic, black-and-white way of seeing ordinary life, but it does not invalidate her moral intuitions. Nor does her moral education over the course of the novel’s arc entail a complete rejection of Gothic fiction in the way that Quixote’s deathbed conversion brings about his repudiation of novels of chivalry and the dreams they inspired. Rather, for Catherine, growing in maturity involves recalibrating her intuitions so as to make them more attuned to the contours of actual “human nature” (“Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works,” writes Austen, “and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for.”)

In subsequent works Austen would abandon the Quixote-like framework she adapts to her own purposes in Northanger Abbey. It is notable that Emma Woodhouse is quite capable of self-delusion without any outside literary assistance, as Mr. Knightley observes with characteristic bluntness:

“Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.”

And at least one of Austen’s protagonists goes even further than Catherine and Emma in the art of self-delusion. He isn’t just an overzealous reader of Gothic fiction; he’s an overzealous and even willfully bad reader of fiction that, while it may not be up to the high standards of Austen’s own work, can lay claim to being at least in the same artistic ballpark. I’m thinking of Sir Edward Denham in Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon. Sir Edward is an older, male version of the Catherine Morland type. He had, Austen writes, “read more sentimental novels than agreed with him.” This sounds more or less like the same habit of binge-reading that gets Don Quixote and Catherine into trouble. Austen goes on:

His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, and most exceptional parts of Richardson’s; and such authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson’s steps, so far as man’s determined pursuit of woman in defiance of every feeling and convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, and formed his character. […] Sir Edward’s great object in life was to be seductive. […] He felt that he was formed to be a dangerous man—quite in the line of the Lovelaces [the seducer in Richardson’s Clarissa].

Ann Radcliffe and company write escapist fiction. By contrast, Richardson, as well as Choderlos de Laclos, with whose novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782) Austen could have been familiar through her cousin Eliza (and whose seducers may have served as the blueprints for the Crawford siblings in Mansfield Park—I have strong suspicions, but have never been able to find a scholar capable of definitively confirming or denying) have different ambitions. Their epistolary fiction explores vanity, power, and the ability of virtuous people to resist seduction. True, the seducers in these works often end up coming off as the most compelling characters, in defiance of the author’s ostensible purposes in creating them. Still, Austen has little or (in comparison with Gothic fiction) much less cause to critique such novels for a lack of realism. The above passage from Sanditon, rather than first and foremost implying Richardson’s limits as a novelist, is a send-up of her character’s own “perversity of judgment,” his self-centered desire to be “seductive” and “a dangerous man.” Sir Edward can make a substitute reality even out of the very fiction that denounces his temptation to do so:

…the graces, the spirit, the sagacity and the perseverance of the villain of the story out-weighed all his absurdities and all his atrocities with Sir Edward. With him such conduct was genius, fire and feeling. It interested and inflamed him. And he was always more anxious for its success, and mourned over its discomfitures with more tenderness, than could ever have been contemplated by the authors.

For Austen, then, the realism of a novel is no proof against its being misread. But if she does not exaggerate the spiritual power of great literature, neither does she “scapegoat” so-called genre fiction. What she suggests is that reading fiction has the effect of intensifying our perceptions and even our moral intuitions, sometimes in misleading ways. Absent good reading habits, a sound education, and some kind of general moral formation, “fancy” will have a tendency to eclipse “understanding.” Austen’s novels disclose our hunger to observe and inhabit imagined lives and to become enthralled by invented stories. She recognizes the potential risks; she will not condemn this hunger as such.