Persuasion in context ⚭
Since this was a re-read after Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, I’m going to put my relevant highlights from that book here.
The references to Burney in Northanger Abbey date to the late 1790s or very early nineteenth century, certainly no later than 1802 or 1803, because in 1802 Burney traveled to France to assist her French husband in some family business, taking advantage of the short-lived cessation of hostilities between France and Britain. When the war resumed in 1803, she was trapped on the wrong side of the Channel, remaining there for the next ten years. She didn’t return to England until shortly before the publication of her final novel, The Wanderer, in 1814—a novel that sold poorly. For a reader of 1816 or 1817, Burney’s name would have had a very different meaning from the one it had held a decade or more earlier.
It’s the first version of Belinda that Jane holds up as an example of the greatness of the novel, not the second, censored version. Her literary references had taken on a different meaning; they no longer read as she’d originally intended.
Jane makes a particular point of not taking us into the bedrooms of married women. She ventures in there on only two occasions. One is the brief scene in Persuasion when the unconscious Louisa Musgrove, the apparent current love interest of the heroine’s former fiancé, is carried to the bed of his naval friends Captain and Mrs. Harville. But this doesn’t really count, because Louisa is seriously ill, having given herself a concussion by misjudging a jump off the stone harbor at Lyme. The other occasion—the one that stands out—is in Northanger Abbey when Catherine becomes obsessed with the idea of getting into the bedroom that belonged to the dead Mrs. Tilney—Henry’s mother, seldom mentioned.
But English culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries wasn’t all that prudish either. It was sexist and morally judgmental, absolutely, but in other respects it was far more relaxed about bodies than we are. You find advertisements for nipple cream in early nineteenth-century newspapers.
There’s a matter-of-factness here about sex and its dangers and about the physical toll that childbirth takes on the female body, an awareness, a respect, almost, that in some ways we’ve lost. It was generally accepted that pregnancy and giving birth weren’t unalloyed pleasures for women; in fact the eighteenth century saw quite a lot of research and development into surgical devices designed specifically to correct anal and vaginal prolapse. All of this perhaps goes some way toward explaining why, for the first two-thirds of Jane’s life, abortion was perfectly legal.
The culture Jane had grown up in didn’t require women to be always joyously accepting of pregnancy.
Postpartum hemorrhage, sepsis—they were very likely to kill you. And there were complications of pregnancy to be considered as well. Ectopic pregnancy was inevitably fatal. In 1855, the novelist Charlotte Brontë died from what was very probably hyperemesis—the violent, unrelenting nausea and vomiting that the current Duchess of Cambridge has suffered from in both her pregnancies. The only treatment for eclampsia was to deliver the baby (this remained the sole treatment until 1957). Cesarean section was very rarely used; surgeons weren’t skilled in it. In the pre-hygiene era, it amounted to a death sentence for the mother anyway.
It’s odd. We know that this isn’t how Jane saw the matter and that it isn’t an accurate representation of childbirth at the time. And it’s particularly odd in fiction. Novels of the period almost always made their heroes and heroines orphans, or apparently orphans. Tragic deaths in childbirth happened all the time in books.
Jane even jokes about it, at the very beginning of Northanger Abbey, saying how “remarkable” it is that her heroine’s mother should possess such a “good constitution,” how unexpected that rather than dying having Catherine, Mrs. Morland has “lived on to have six children more” and “see them growing up around her.” It’s part of the fun Jane has in the opening chapters, skewering every novelistic convention she can think of.
Just as we, hearing of the sudden death of a young or youngish woman, default to ideas of a car crash or cancer, so Jane’s readers would guess at childbirth as a cause of death before anything else, for married women at least.
As we’ve seen, though, Jane surely hoped—she surely intended, when she wrote it—for her readers to find something different and altogether more complicated in the novel. Jane assumed, when she was writing the book, that her readers would know certain novels and plays, would read certain references into the text. This is what she’s talking about, in the advertisement. She expected, originally, readers who were familiar enough with gothic novels to realize what’s passed nearly every modern reader by—the fact that Catherine Morland, probably the best-known gothic novel reader in the world, reads only one gothic novel and doesn’t even seem to finish it.
Isabella, it’s clear, hasn’t read any of these novels herself; she’s going on the recommendation of her “particular friend” Miss Andrews, who has “read every one of them.” Not reading is quite a theme in this most self-consciously bookish of Jane’s novels.
What Jane’s trying to do here, it seems to me, is to keep Catherine trapped in a state of suspense that her own readers never have to share. Jane’s readers, if they’ve read Udolpho properly, to the end, ought to be able to pick out all the references and in-jokes that pass Catherine by so completely.
All of this leads us to the rather odd conclusion that Catherine, at Northanger, is acting out parts of Udolpho, slipping from one role to another, but—apparently—without being aware of what she’s doing.
It’s not even entirely clear that we’re in Catherine’s mind at this point; the voice of the narrator is more intrusive in Northanger than it is in Jane’s later novels, and far less deftly deployed.
Jane has gone to quite a lot of trouble to suggest that Catherine either hasn’t read more than half a gothic novel or, if she has, has read it with such a breathtaking lack of attention that she might as well not have bothered.
What Jane is trying to show with Catherine, I would suggest, is a reader who doesn’t read properly, who brings her own preconceptions and expectations to the text, who blames the author for the ideas she’s gained from an incomplete, inattentive reading. Jane doesn’t intend to “desert” her sister authoress Radcliffe, to expose her to ridicule. She’s attempting to do the opposite. (nb: ironic that this is now Jane’s dilemma!)
Catherine, who, we’re told, learned it “as quickly as any girl 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 kinds of subjects that—wrongly—we consider distant from Jane’s novels.
Catherine’s “indulgence” in Udolpho is only the match to a pile of literary and cultural fuel; what burns, what drives her behavior, 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 toward 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 toward Mrs. Tilney’s bedroom than a few pages of a novel, or a copperplate illustration.
Of all Jane’s novels it’s not Persuasion but Northanger Abbey that 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.
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’s suite at the Chateau-le-Blanc; by Blue Beard’s chamber, filled with the corpses of his dead wives.
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 labors, 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.
A reader might imagine that no one survived much beyond fifty in the early nineteenth century, though in fact, if you adjust for the far higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy wasn’t so very much lower than it is today.