Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey & Emma

Catherine is darkhaired, not clean-living; she prefers boys' sports to tending flowers; she rather wishes she could draw and paint barely isn't genuinely good at it; she has a large, affectionate family and is not an deprive in the storm; she has neither patience for nor interest in being an accomplished musician or scholar. To put it some other way, she has no extraordinary virtues commonly thought of as normal of a heroine of great adventures; indeed, Catherine "had by nature nothing do-or-die(a) some her" (368). Rather, her virtues are the ordinary ones that ought to be expected from every moderately wellbroughtup child: "she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarce ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of shogunate" (368).

How is it that Austen is at pains to describe Catherine in nonheroic terms notwithstanding that she has placed Catherine at the center of the novel? The reader is right away alerted to the fact that nothing in her ordinary upbringing prevents the insipid Catherine from internalizing the unreal psychology of a mediaeval world and project it onto the real world. She has read books, "provided that nothing like useful acquaintance could be gained from t

opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave

This fate remark is the culmination of Emma's subjective approach to the world; it is inevitable that, having repeatedly employed her facility with words to speak effectively if not thoughtfully in order to contract at want genial consequences, she will speak in that way and arrive at unintended social consequences. Emma knows that her words are social weapons and that they presuppose moral positions and moral authority and inhere in moral actions. What she does not know until the Box Hill succession is that the ability to use words well is not the alike thing as doing so. Before Box Hill, Emma's interior life story is preoccupied with the fortunes of others and what she perceives to be their true feelings, needs, wants.

Indeed, until Box Hill, Emma has spent a good deal of her time not only analyzing but also attempting to recast everyone who is touched by her analysis. The only someone she turns out to be absolutely right about from depression impression is the tooloud and flashy Mrs. Elton, whose very figurehead in Highbury is a kind of "payoff" of Emma's ill ill-fated manipulation of Mr. Elton and Harriet.

Austen's ironic attitude toward the psychic populace of the Gothic genre is also a moral judgment against the throw away she plainly believes it has on the postadolescent female mind. Her objection is shown to be that the gothic presents itself as a straightforward piece of reportage about the way of the world, when as a matter of fact on that point is a tremendous gap between gothic reality and the reality of everyday life. This explains the statement that Catherine placed herself "in didactics for a heroine" (369). It also explains Austen's suggestion that adolescent and postadolescent mental processes moderate colored Catherine's reading of betterquality literature and taken it out of context so as to position herself in the center of a lyric adventure. She is preparing herself to experience the grander emotions
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