The Catherine Morland in All of Us

A re-read of Northanger Abbey that made me wonder if the heroine is really as naive as we think

In honor of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birthday, the newsletter The Austen Connection is doing a year-long readalong of all of her works, starting with Northanger Abbey.

Northanger Abbey, when people talk about it¹is known for two things: its loving parody of Gothic novels, which were popular at the time, and its naive, kind of silly heroine, Catherine Morland.

The conventional wisdom goes, Catherine Morland is a sheltered, not very interesting person who is naive and foolish, easily led astray. She thinks that life is like a Gothic novel and her foolishness comes to a head when she convinces herself that General Tilney, her love interest Henry Tilney’s father, must have murdered his wife or is keeping her secretly captive.²

However, I don’t think Catherine is actually that naive at all, she is merely uneducated in the ways of polite society, ie. Bath. She also has better instincts than most people think and is able to see through the artificial machinations of the Thorpes several times in the novel before the metaphorical shit really hits the fan. The problem? Like most women, she does not trust her own instincts. Not only that, she is actively prevented from doing so by people that she knows and trusts. who lead her to doubt her own instincts and cause her to sink further into the sea of confusion that lead to her worst blunders.

To be clear, this isn’t an original thought—Dr. Maria DeBlassie in the aforementioned The Austen Connection newsletter said something very similar: “Here’s the thing that’s easy to overlook in the midst of Catherine’s comical antics: In many cases, she is right in what she is feeling. Her instincts are spot on, even if she does stir herself into a frenzy wondering what terrible secrets Northanger Abbey…might hold or feel conflicted about the Thorpe siblings’ seemingly sincere words that inevitably contrast with their bad behavior.” I’m interested in examining a bit more how we get from her instincts that are good at the root to behavior that may seem naive or foolish.

One of the main people that Catherine is deceived by is Isabella Thorpe (really the only person that fully confuses her). Isabella shows up when Catherine is absolutely desperate for a friend and immediately bombards her with affection and charm which wins Catherine over, even if she does begin to notice that some of her friend’s actions are less than sincere. This is where Catherine’s sheltered nature comes in. Austen’s narrator makes a dig at the Morland parents at the beginning for neglecting the education of their older daughters. An education or friendly word of advice might have helped her see that unlike her, Miss Thorpe has not come to Bath just to make friends and sightsee. A worse consequence of this lack of preparation is that Catherine is relatively aware of her own relative ignorance, and that makes her more inclined to doubt herself. If she thinks that something is right, and Isabella insists that they should do something else, she defers to her perceived experience (really, her cunning) instead of to her own instincts because the message, reinforced by everyone around her, is that she really doesn’t know what she’s doing in Bath.

That is the real problem, why Catherine so frequently makes mistakes and doesn’t read a situation properly—she is attuning her thoughts to those of the people around her who she thinks have her best interests at heart and know better than her, but who really are leading her astray. Take John Thorpe, for example. Catherine realizes almost immediately that he is an arrogant bore, but she doesn’t say so out of fear of hurting the feelings of her brother and her friend. There’s even a scene where her brother outright asks her what she thinks, but afraid of disappointing him, she (very transparently) equivocates and he doesn’t read through it.

In return, both James and Isabella completely disregard her obvious signs of discomfort at Thorpe’s repeated attentions, including when he forces her to stay in his carriage in a terrifying experience, for their own selfish reasons. Catherine continues to tamp down her true instincts against Thorpe as much as she can, because the other option, that both her brother and best friend are setting her up with a man she clearly dislikes just to get her out of the way, is a worse reality to face.

(Side note: a lot is said about Catherine’s naivete, but James Morland proposes to Isabella without noticing what kind of person she is, completely disregards his sister’s feelings, and unlike her has had time away from home and at Oxford, so is way less sheltered! Although the fact that Thorpe is his best friend shows that he is a poor judge of character)

Catherine turns to Mrs. Allen, her erstwhile chaperone, for validation of her instincts that John Thorpe’s behavior and invitations are inappropriate, but is instead brushed off. It is only Mr. Allen who later confirms that it is inappropriate to go driving off in the country alone with a man you are not related to, something Catherine instinctively felt, but was encouraged to do anyway by nearly everyone she trusted around her in Bath.

The biggest example of Catherine’s supposed ignorance and naivete is her snooping around Northanger Abbey for proof of General Tilney’s murder of his wife—which let’s be clear, is a wild thing to do as a houseguest. However, her suspicions about the General killing his wife only occur after she spends some time at Northanger Abbey and notices how tense the atmosphere is whenever he is around (and that, like Isabella Thorpe, he is one of those people that just never says what they mean!). She has already been taught that she cannot trust her instincts and that she is not a good judge of character, so subconsciously, she feels that to justify her discomfort with the General, there must be a “real” reason—like his being a murder.³

So what does this mean for the rest of us who are not 19th century Austen heroines? That’s the reason why all the girlies are reading and writing about Austen—because the human bones of the situations she puts her character in still resonate. Many of us have had that frenemy that subtly makes us feel bad about ourselves or second-guess our own instincts, but on the surface seemed so nice that we thought we were nuts to doubt her. We’ve all had situations where we wanted to do one thing but let other people convince us that our instincts were wrong. Catherine Morland’s maturity does not just lie in recognizing fact from fiction and rejecting her novels, it lies in recognizing fact from fiction in real life and learning how to tell when people are deceiving her, even when they are her friends.

1. I’d put it in the third tier of Austen in terms of hype. The first is Pride and Prejudice, then Emma and Sense and Sensibility. My only metric is vibes/how often I see them referred to online, largely I think in relation to how successful their film adaptations (or even parodies) were.

2. What is silly in one book would have been prescient in another (Jane Eyre , for example, might have done well to snoop around a bit).

3. I don’t want to go “my therapist said” in an essay so I’m going to squeeze in a cheeky little footnote, but my therapist has mentioned that it’s actually quite common for women to create elaborate scenarios where they are the clear victims to avoid situations where they may feel ambivalence about demonstrating “negative” emotions.