Surprise by Miller Christopher R.;

Author:Miller, Christopher R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception

Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

“Surprizes,” George Knightley curtly declares in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), “are foolish things.”1 He is referring to a specific incident, but nearly a century after the publication of Robinson Crusoe and several decades after the first flush of gothic romance, his comment carries a larger metafictional implication: that the project of plotting surprises is frivolous, and that the readerly susceptibility to them reflects a childish naïveté or delight in passing sensation. Austen’s novels are full of surprising incidents, but they conspicuously lack several familiar eighteenth-century elements: the romance tropes of foundlings and hidden family relationships; the sexual menace and violence in surprise that runs through the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney; and the set pieces of astonishment that Fielding flaunts. Instead of borrowing these données, Austen explores the uses and abuses of surprise—its sexual politics, its aesthetic dimensions, its psychic and emotional contours. In many ways, Austen carries on the comic project of Fielding and Sterne: she represents emotion not just as a datum of experience but as a medium of social expression, a rhetorical form, a theatrical performance, and a feeling to be controlled or suppressed.

My centerpiece in this chapter is Northanger Abbey, for this early work not only pokes obvious fun at the shock effects of gothic novels, it also serves as a witty dissertation on surprise in all its eighteenth-century inflections. The novel invokes the word itself with greater frequency than Austen’s other works, and it features one of Austen’s most easily surprisable characters, Catherine Morland. The young heroine, who leaves the provincial routine of Fullerton for the social intrigues of Bath, is perpetually startled by the books she reads and the people she meets, even as Austen’s narrator archly registers the presumably jaded reader’s familiarity with novelistic conventions and the ways of the world. Between the naïf and the godlike narrator (in winking alliance with the know-it-all audience), Austen creates a reading space of simulated or virtual surprise.

In aesthetic terms, I argue that Austen asserts a legitimate place for surprise as a locus of pleasure, both in lived experience and in narrative mediation; that she follows Fielding in both courting the reader’s surprise and reflexively commenting on narrative artifice and the poetics of wish fulfillment; and that she parodies the shock effects of gothic fiction while absorbing their perceptual syntax. In ethical terms, I argue that even as Austen mocks easily surprisable characters, she more keenly scrutinizes the pose of stoic or omniscient resis tance to shock, often adopted by male characters; and that she examines the social dynamics of surprise as function of naïveté, secrecy, and the gendered circulation of information. Austen’s heroines are not in danger of the violent, sexual manifestations of surprise that haunt the fiction of Richardson, Haywood, and Burney; but they are nevertheless vulnerable to other forms. Surprises (and the people who fall for them) might on occasion be foolish, but they are never only that.

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