“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid” proclaims a character in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” With this playful and audacious line, Austen defends her own chosen vocation as a writer, while reminding readers of the great value of a good novel. Elsewhere in the book she says that in a good novel “the greatest powers of the mind are displayed” and “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
All that is certainly true of “Northanger Abbey,” which sparkles with wit and wisdom. With a strong satirical edge, the novel reveals Austen’s keen understanding of human nature and its vanity. One of the characteristics of human life especially well-delineated in the work is the nature of friendship. With great acuity, “Northanger Abbey” explores elements of true and false friendships, as well as the consequences flowing from each.
In fact, “Northanger Abbey” provides just the kind of wisdom about friendship that its heroine, Catherine Morland, lacks—and this deficiency plays centrally in the conflict of the story as well has Catherine’s own character arc.
The Novel
At the beginning of the novel, 17-year-old Catherine goes on a holiday with some old family friends to the fashionable town of Bath. The adventurous Catherine—whose imagination has been largely shaped by poor-quality melodramatic Gothic literature—popular in Austen’s time—is elated by the prospect of the trip. Naïve, good-hearted, and guileless, she enters Bath with very little knowledge of the world and the fickleness of human beings.According to Austen, Catherine has an affectionate heart, “manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl,” and a “mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.”
“Northanger Abbey” is in many ways a coming-of-age novel, and Catherine begins it as barely more than a child. She lacks the experience to ferret out the façades and falsehoods of others. She doesn’t understand, for instance, the difference between a true and false friendship, nor does her gaze penetrate past an outward show of affection or good humor to see a true character underneath.
According to Aristotle, the third and best degree of friendship is the friendship of virtue. In this type, the friends like one another based on their respective character. They value one another as people, and they aim to help one another achieve virtue. Each friend desires the good of the other.
The first friendship Catherine forms in Bath is with a young woman named Isabella Thorpe. For Isabella, the friendship is a friendship of utility. It flows purely from convenience and pleasure and has nothing to do with virtue or goodwill. Isabella and her brother John are interested in Catherine for what they gain from the relationship: amusement, flattery, and (for John) some romantic excitement.
As Isabella’s false modesty and John’s droll conversation soon demonstrate, they have little interest in Catherine or her best interests—they’re locked in self-absorption and vanity. Because of her inexperience and trusting nature, Catherine fails to recognize the truth, even though it’s obvious to the reader.
Isabella and John’s false friendship toward Catherine manifests itself most strikingly when they (and Catherine’s brother, James) pressure her into breaking off an appointment with another pair of new friends—Henry and Eleanor Tilney—for the sake of their own plans to visit a castle. With no regard for Catherine’s feelings and no sense of the injustice toward the Tilneys, they use persuasion and even trickery to make her break her promise.
At first, Catherine has neither the strength nor the full awareness to resist, but as their deception dawns on her, she begins to exercise—for the first time—some agency. She manages to disentangle herself from the plot, so that she can keep her word to the Tilneys. This is an important step in her journey to maturity.
What appears at first to be high spirits and forthrightness in Isabella’s character soon shows itself to be vanity and false humility. Throughout the novel, Isabella perpetually states the opposite of what she really means. She incessantly condemns others for what she does herself. She proclaims, “I never think of myself”—yet, in reality, that’s her only preoccupation. She proclaims that she hates inconstancy, yet no one behaves with more fickleness than she.
After Isabella breaks off her engagement with Catherine’s brother James in favor of someone richer and then tries to regain James’s favor when the second relationship falls through, she complains that “young men never know their minds two days together.” Isabella’s alleged “love” for James perfectly typifies a relationship of utility, for it’s motivated by nothing more than vanity and fortune-hunting.
Isabella’s brother John isn’t much better. He frequently exaggerates to puff up his own stature in the eyes of others, and pursues relationships for selfish ends. Austen provides an excellent example of a friendship of utility when she describes John’s conduct toward James, saying that he spurned “a friendship which could be no longer serviceable.”
True Friendship
In contrast to all this, Catherine’s other friends in Bath, the siblings Henry and Eleanor Tilney, provide a very different portrait of friendship. They enjoy Catherine’s company and conversation for its own sake, and their own conversation is devoid of the conceit and banality that characterizes the Thorpes’. When Catherine, Eleanor, and Henry are together, their gaze is directed outwards, toward each other and the world, and their conversation is warmed by true affection, interest, and vitality.When misfortune strikes Catherine’s family (brought on by the Thorpes), the Tilneys are anxious to comfort and console her. Henry Tilney is also quick to apologize to Catherine on behalf of his father when the old man treats her rudely and unjustly. In point of fact, Henry’s regard for Catherine and her welfare crosses over from mere friendship to true love. This is Jane Austen, after all.
Henry and Eleanor Tilney are the perfect foils for John and Isabella Thorpe. Austen presents the kindly Tilneys as near-opposites to the egotistical Thorpes, with Catherine caught in between for the first half of the novel, precariously poised between these two sets of influences, pulled in two directions at once. Ultimately, her instinctual good-heartedness supplies for her naiveté, drawing her almost subconsciously toward the Tilneys and away from the toxic Thorpes.
Catherine ends up spending a good deal of time with the Tilneys at their home, Northanger Abbey. There she experiences some further correctives on her tendency to judge others superficially. In the same way that she leapt too quick to a favorable opinion of Isabella in Bath, she slips thoughtlessly into too unfavorable an opinion of the Tilneys’ father based on the wild fantasies of an undisciplined imagination. When Henry Tilney learns that Catherine suspects her father of nothing less than murder, he gently—but firmly—brings her back to her senses.
This mortifying experience, however, is but one more growing pain in Catherine’s journey of maturation over the course of the novel. It—along with further revelations of Isabella’s cruel treatment of James—allows Catherine to fully recognize the shallowness, self-importance, and inconstancy of her former friend. When Isabella writes to Catherine in hopes of re-ingratiating herself with the family, Catherine’s reaction is very different than her former admiration for Isabella.
Austen writes: “Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood, struck her from the very first. She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her. Her professions of attachment were not as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent.”
This scene signifies the extent to which Catherine has matured and gained wisdom. The idea is echoed in a metaphorical way through a description of Catherine traveling through a landscape where she sees old sights in a new way:
“The road she now travelled was the same which only ten days ago she had so happily passed along in going to and from Woodston; and, for fourteen miles, every bitter feeling was rendered more severe by the review of objects on which she had first looked under impressions so different.”
Bitter—yes, Catherine must undergo some bitter experiences in order to gain necessary experience and maturity. That’s part of the process of growing up. Yet the reward is worth the labor. She comes to a deeper understanding of human nature, the risks of judging by appearances, and the value of true friendship.
Catherine finds something more than friendship: love, which, when unselfish and true, so far outstrips the ugliness of self-seeking “friendship” that the two cannot be compared. In trading one for the other, Catherine makes the best exchange.
