The message of Northanger Abbey: is there one?

What to make of Northanger Abbey? I reread it this year as I planned to do as part of the Jane Austen Rereading Project and was pleasantly surprised, as it was more enjoyable than I remembered it. I've said before that it's my least favourite Austen novel, but I'm not so sure now: with its wealth of dialogue, it's a livelier read than the exposition-heavy Sense and Sensibility. It's also less of a critique/parody of the Gothic genre than I expected - the main plot is a straightforward Austenesque one hinging on how the heroine manages to bag her man. But this is what's so puzzling about it. Since most of the story is in no way dependent on the whole Gothic novel context, why bother with it in the first place?

The two TV adaptations of Northanger I've seen have both played up the protagonist Catherine Moreland's propensity for daydreaming. Her dreams and fantasies, where the people she meets in real life are cast in various Gothic-novel parts, are contrasted with her more humdrum reality. In fact, the novel's Catherine isn't as big a fantasist as all that. It's only for a comparatively short section of the book, when she is staying at Northanger Abbey itself, that she believes herself caught up in a Gothic mystery. During all the time she stays in Bath with her friends the Allens she has no exalted expectations of great adventures. Moreover, aside from making a friend of the mercenary flirt Isabella Thorpe - an error of judgement which is totally understandable in a seventeen-year-old, especially as the Thorpes are for a time the only acquaintances the Allens have in town - Catherine behaves pretty sensibly in Bath. She quickly realises that Isabella's brother John, in spite of being the friend of her own brother James, is someone whose company is to be avoided as much as possible. In spite of the Thorpeses' best efforts, she manages to make the better acquaintance of Henry Tilney (her love interest) and his sister Eleanor (too sensible to be much fun at this stage). She quickly notices something is off when Isabella, by this time betrothed to James, starts flirting with Henry Tilney's brother. When she voices her concerns to Henry, he waves them away, but in time Catherine is proven to be right: Isabella's association with Captain Tilney does lead to (an implied) scandal.

In fact, when Austen contrasts Gothic novel clichés with Catherine's reality in the first half of the novel, it's not the heroine's expectations she's puncturing but the reader's. This soon gets a little wearisome, especially if you didn't expect a Gothic yarn to begin with or in fact don't have much conception of what a Gothic yarn is like. It's a problem for me - and I suspect many a modern reader -that I have very little knowledge of the kind of book Austen's supposedly parodying. The more she concentrates on what does happen in Catherine's life, without pointing out how different this is from what would have happened in a Gothic novel, the better Northanger Abbey works for me.

So what does Austen want to say when she's sending up the Gothic novel? That you shouldn't confuse fiction with reality? It always makes me impatient when a novel preaches the importance of keeping fiction and reality apart, because the novel's reality is, of course, also a fiction. The unrelenting misery of the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary is as much of a construct as a happily-ever-after would have been, and some of the characters - ruthless merchant, womanising local squire - are types you'd be much more likely to come across within the pages of a novel than in a real small town in 19th century France. What's more, there's something disloyal about a novel that aims to show the dangerous influence of novels on impressionable minds. Jane Austen herself claims, in a defence of the novel which can be found in Northanger Abbey: "I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding". Is she as good as her word, though?

If there's a moral lesson to be learned in Catherine's mistakes, it is a pretty confused one, for in a way, she is vindicated. Her greatest fault is believing that Henry's father, General Tilney, did away with his wife or has her secretly locked up. This isn't true, and Catherine is suitably mortified when Henry guesses what she has been thinking. But the General is still the villain of the piece - he is a domestic tyrant, he throws Catherine out of his house when he discovers that she isn't the heiress he thought she was, and there's much to indicate that he was as impatient with his deceased wife as he is with his children. He expects his offspring to marry into money, more or less pimps Henry to Catherine as long as he thinks she's an heiress, and probably married money himself. Catherine leaping to the conclusion that the General is a murderer on scant evidence is very silly, but not as silly as if the General, in spite his formidable manners, had turned out to be a good egg after all.

The Introduction of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Northanger Abbey argues that the novel is in fact a subtle defence of the Gothic novel, and that Catherine's adventures do in fact have a flavour of the Gothic. The General's character is a case in point. As for the "rational" Henry Tilney, he is a mansplaining idiot (this is more elegantly expressed, of course). It's easy to agree with the opinion that Henry's protests against Catherine's imaginings sound hollow. His argument is that such things would never happen in England, with its admirable laws and institutions etc. This means that he's not really defending the General at all - he's saying that his country, not his father, is too civilised for anything too Gothic to take place. Which apart from being insulting to the General is a pretty dumb argument in itself as the most spectacular crimes can happen in the most well-ordered of societies.

However, I'm not sure I completely buy the argument that Austen is defending the Gothic novel as an art form that may contain a kernel of truth in spite of its sensationalism. It is she, not the reader, who has been scathing about Gothic clichés in the first place - what's the point of knocking down the pieces she herself has set up? The surface contradictions of Northanger Abbey may contain a message of some kind - say, that the relationship between reality and fiction is too complicated to be summed up in "novels are a trusty guide to explaining real life" or "novels are nothing like real life". But there is another possibility. Austen was a master craftswoman, but this is after all the first full-length novel she wrote. She may have started it intending it to be a parody of a Gothic novel, then not found the exercise interesting enough. While writing, she then gravitated more and more towards the kind of psychological realism - with a good deal of romance thrown in - that would become her trademark. Even the brightest authors don't always have a master plan - sometimes they just make things up as they go along. Northanger Abbey may not be trying to tell us anything in particular about "good" novels, "bad" novels and ordinary life after all.