“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.
Knightley’s comment about the foolishness of surprise exemplifies the kind of ethical attention that Austen devotes to the subject. While he is referring to the unexpected gift of a fortepiano to Jane Fairfax, his dismissal more broadly applies to the array of guessing games—riddles, charades, word scrambles, gossipy speculations—that absorb the attention of so many characters in the novel. The remark can be construed as making two points. First, the act of planning a surprise is foolish because it requires the artificial suppression of information; it promotes misunderstandings and needless emotional turmoil; and it wastes time in demanding the production of an answer that already exists. (The kind of guessing game that Mr. B imposes on Pamela at the end of Richardson’s novel would be anathema to Knightley.) Second, the vulnerability to surprise indicates a foolish character: it is a sign of moral and intellectual weakness to be caught off guard by anything. For Knightley, the aspersion against “surprizes” is vindicated when the donor of the fortepiano turns out to be Frank Churchill, who represents the height of puppyish callowness and French sophistication. All the elements of Knightley’s social identity—his class, his gender, his age, his reputed sagacity—are braided into his assumption. As someone who has seemingly withdrawn from the hazards of courtship and prides himself on his anticipatory acuity, he purports to be beyond surprise; and in Emma’s assessment of him as a plain-dealing man, he “does nothing mysteriously” (211). Finally, a hint of biblical sermonizing tinges Knightley’s remark: addressed to the woman destined to become his wife, it serves as a Pauline exhortation to put away childish things.
Austen undoubtedly sympathized with Knightley’s stance, insofar as she frequently poked fun at naïve or excitable characters who startle at mere coincidence or rhetorically exaggerate their degree of shock. Consider this description of the easily flappable Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility (1811): “The sudden termination of Col o nel Brandon’s visit at the park, with the steadiness in concealing its cause, filled the mind and raised the wonder of Mrs. Jennings for two or three days; she was a great wonderer, as every one must be who takes a very lively interest in all the comings and goings of their acquaintance” (62).2 In the course of a single page, “wonder” conspicuously appears five more times, and through this verbal repetition, the word metamorphoses from an Addisonian term for the emotion of Novelty (“filled the mind”) into a synonym for the restless curiosity of a busybody (“So wondered, so talked Mrs. Jennings”). In effect, Austen echoes Fielding’s strategy of describing ordinary surprise in the grandiose language of the miraculous. Her gentle mockery here reflects a tradition of skepticism about wonder crystallized by Samuel Johnson in a Rambler essay of 1751, where he calls it “the effect of ignorance” and “a pause of reason”: “The awful stillness of attention with which the mind is overspread at the first view of an unexpected effect ceases when we have leisure to disentangle complications and investigate causes.”3
The first gothic romance would not be published for another thirteen years, but Johnson’s description of a mind “overspread” by awful stillness and paralyzed by “sudden cessation” prefigures the trope of mental incapacitation that characterized that emerging genre. For readers of gothic fiction, there was pleasure to be derived from the sensation Johnson describes—a “pause” or epistemological hesitation that Tzvetan Todorov would later value in his formulation of the Fantastic.4 For Johnson, however, there was nothing particularly pleasurable or edifying about it. By his lights, the experience does not belong in a privileged aesthetic category, and the sooner it can be dispelled by rationality, the better.
It is easy to appreciate Austen’s gentle mockery of Mrs. Jennings’s “wonder,” but I want to suggest that such passages also reflect the author’s fine-grained attention to emotional mimesis. This anatomy of a surprise and its aftermath exemplifies what D.A. Miller has formulated as the neutrality and anonymity of “Austen Style.”5 Though it does not quite reach the intimacy of free indirect discourse epitomized in Emma, it goes beyond merely omniscient narration: it hovers between the external (Fieldingesque ridicule) and the internal (a sympathetic mimesis of thought), between the presence of a narrative hand and the illusion of its absence. This style enables a narrative freedom to present surprise as both a foolish thing and an aperçu about the unknowability of others—for regardless of Mrs. Jennings’s excitability, sudden arrivals and departures are surprises in Austen’s fiction, and Col o nel Brandon does present a mystery that the plot is designed to solve. Austen surely harbored some doubts, then, about Knightley’s and Johnson’s strong opinions on surprise and wonder. Far from expressing the last word on the subject, Knightley’s pronouncement stakes out an extreme position—one, I argue, that Austen qualified in numerous ways. As unassailable as Knightley seems, he also represents a particularly masculine attitude of resis tance to surprise in all its forms; and Austen was just as skeptical toward this pose as she was toward putatively feminine modes of vulnerability.
In focusing on the importance of surprise in Northanger Abbey, I want to suggest that it has not previously received the respect it deserves. In critical commentary on the novel, there have been two main accounts of Catherine’s vulnerability to surprise: one dismisses it as a symptom of naïveté, the other conflates it with its stronger relative, alarm. Stuart Tave, echoing Knightley, offers this gloss: “Surprise is a foolish thing; as it offers itself in, for example, the indeterminateness of what is ‘odd’ and as it creates the emotion of an undefined ‘alarm,’ it is dissolved; in its stead is a process of understanding by means of ‘observation’ of what is and a determination of ‘probability.’”6 In what is essentially a novel of education, Catherine must abandon her gothic suspicion that her host at the abbey, General Tilney, has killed his wife, and yield to a clear-eyed reckoning of the probable.
More recent criticism has reclaimed “alarm” from the realm of the naïve and feeble-minded to assert genuine, lingering concerns that the novel cannot resolve or contain. As Tony Tanner puts it, “‘Common life’ has proved to be capable of producing surprising uncommonness; anxiety may be a form of controlled alarm.”7 The patriarchal tyranny of General Tilney, who summarily banishes Catherine from the abbey after discovering that she is not the wealthy catch for his son that he had imagined, is momentarily softened rather than decisively cured; and in Tanner’s punning observation, the ghostly traces of “anger”—snobbery, emotional coldness, patriarchal irritability—still linger. In a similar vein, Claudia Johnson observes that Northanger Abbey is “an alarming novel to the extent that it, in its own unassuming and matter-of-fact way, domesticates the gothic and brings its apparent excesses into the drawing rooms of ‘the midland countries of En gland.’”8 Echoing Miller’s paradigm of the novel’s anticlosural discontents,9 Johnson argues that “the convention of the happy ending conceals our all-too-legitimate cause for alarm” (48). That cause, in Johnson’s reading, lies in the arbitrary power of paternal figures like General Tilney.
It is not at all surprising that Austen’s affective language would be so readily imported into late twentieth-century critical rubrics of anxiety, subversion, interrogation, and critique; and Tanner’s and Johnson’s readings tell a fundamental truth about the novel’s dialectic. These accounts, as well as Tave’s, use the gothic as a reference point: for Tave, a foil to the domestic and ordinary, for Tanner and Johnson, an amplification of issues of gender and power. I would agree with Tanner and Johnson that Austen asserts genuine causes for alarm in the novel, but I also wish to emphasize an often-overlooked emotional correlate, surprise. The difference between alarm and surprise is, in part, a function of time: the former is a state of sustained fear or anxiety; the latter is a briefer flare of feeling, a passage to some other emotional or cognitive state, and an experience that can be a source of either discomfort or pleasure, or both. Many readers have noticed the novel’s stylistic unevenness, the awkward fit between the parody of gothic romance and the Burneyesque narration of a young woman’s entrance into the world; by focusing on surprise, I wish to identify an emotional current that runs through both parts.10
I make several claims about the function of surprise in Northanger Abbey. First, I argue that Austen owes a largely unexamined debt to the perceptual syntax of surprise in gothic narrative. Austen’s engagement with the thematic elements of gothic—her English domestication of the exotic Eu rope an setting, her adoption of the patriarchal ogre, her representation of an interpretive community—has been well explored. But I want to suggest that Austen also borrows a mimetic vocabulary that goes beyond a set of easily satirized données. (Indeed, Austen’s satirical take on the excesses of gothic astonishment was anticipated by the reflexive and ironizing vein within the gothic itself: both Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had already registered the potential exhaustion of astonishing spectacle and powerful feeling.) The nature and object of Austenian emotion might be different, but the manner of portraying it harks back to gothic romance; and for this reason, I will begin by considering several representative scenes in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796) as innovative models for representing sudden impulses of thought and feeling. Gothic fiction offered Austen a narrative vocabulary that she readily adapted: the representation of surprise as both spectacle and interior process, an emphasis on the power of ordinary objects or events to startle, and a grammar of perception and recognition.
Turning to Northanger Abbey, I consider the sexual politics of surprise, focusing on the two suitors for Catherine’s affections, Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. It is no accident that these characters display markedly different attitudes to gothic fiction and to novel reading more generally: while Tilney professes enthusiasm and interest, Thorpe affects jaded familiarity and disdain. I will argue that Austen deploys these figures not only as obvious foils in a courtship plot but also as two avatars of masculine resis tance to—and control over—the power of surprise. While both characters affect this pose, Tilney’s lively conversations with Catherine enable Austen to assert a positive value for surprise. Even more than in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, or Persuasion, the heroine’s courtship is mediated by eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse: novelty is both a subject of conversation and a name for the cluster of new feelings and thoughts that arise in flirtatious conversation. Discussing the plots and merits of novels, acquiring the language of the picturesque, parsing the lexical nuances of words for the sublime (“shocking”) and the beautiful (“nice”), learning to love a rose—all are alibis (and stimuli) for the growing erotic interest between hero and heroine. These things are, like Henry himself, novelties to Catherine, and it is partly for this reason that surprise figures so prominently in the narrative. It is a both a conversational subtext (what surprises you? what should or should not surprise you?) and a structure of feeling—a psychic element of flirtation, as Adam Phillips has defined it. “In flirtation,” he notes, “you never know whether the beginning of the story—the story of the relationship—will be the end; flirtation, that is to say, exploits the idea of surprise.”11
In related terms, surprise is a function of youth. Notably, the enthusiastic consumers of novels in Northanger Abbey are young people, and the high premium on novelty pertains to both books and people—the recent publication, the new acquaintance, the fresh experience, the narrative twist. Sigmund Freud suggested that only the very young can derive equal pleasure from subsequent repetitions of experiences such as stories or jokes, whereas in adulthood, “Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment.”12 Austen’s heroine, poised between childhood and maturity, desires the gratification of reading a favorite genre of fiction but intuits the fragility and transience of those pleasures.
On a metafictional level, surprise reflects Austen’s concern with the reader’s experience of the novel as at once both familiar and new. Austen flatters readers by assuming their powers of narrative anticipation, even as she constructs scenes designed to savor moments of characters’ surprise. Though it is an ephemeral emotion, surprise is not to be hastily dismissed but rather valued as a component of aesthetic experience; it is not only a state to transcend through rational judgment but also a figure of delight. As I argue below, Catherine’s surprises are implicated in Austen’s narrative relationship to her audience: the imagination of what it is like to read this novel, both knowing and not knowing how it will end. To articulate Austen’s poetics of wish fulfillment, I will consider two analogous scenes of interminable waiting, in which a thought—call it a prayer or a wish—is suddenly answered. In each case, I will examine the mechanism of surprise by which Catherine is rewarded, and the rhetoric of stoic resignation, probabilistic thought, and providential design that surrounds each event.
I conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of Catherine’s antitype—perhaps the least surprisable heroine in Austen’s fiction, Anne Elliott. A favorite pursuit of Austen scholarship has long been to articulate what changes from the “early phase” to the “major phase,”13 and I would like to contribute to that conversation by suggesting how the novelist rethinks the representation of surprise in the late novel Persuasion, and how she further innovates on the affective conventions of eighteenth-century fiction. My final example in a series of surprising events is very far from the chiaroscuro shock effects of gothic and yet very much in their spirit. It is also a fitting closural punctuation both to Austen’s oeuvre and to a critical consideration of her astonishing effects: the sound of a dropped pen.
As the first English gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto stands at the beginning of a new tradition, but its opening scene harks back to an older poetics of astonishment. It begins with a literal statue of surprise: a horrifying object that both signifies petrifaction and induces that state in characters: a gargantuan plumed helmet has just crushed Conrad, the sickly young heir of a fraudulent dynasty, on the morning of his nuptials to Isabella of Vicenza. Companion fragments (an armored hand, a foot) subsequently appear, all of them simulacra of a black marble effigy of a prior ruler, Alfonso the Good. These sightings confirm what Manfred, the usurper of the Otranto title, fears from the start: that his claim to the principality is doomed, and Alfonso’s true descendant will eventually be revealed.
Like the “statue of surprize” scene in Joseph Andrews, this is a detailed ekphrasis of shock with all the familiar elements of speechlessness, petrifaction, and recognition; but to an even greater extent than Fielding, Walpole represents the perceptual and emotional experience of suddenness—both the shock of the phenomenal world and internal stabs of consciousness.14 Here and elsewhere in the novel, he discovers the expressive possibilities of indirection as a way of creating an atmosphere of dread: not the crash but its aftermath, not the corpse but the casque, not the sound but the ensuing silence. Shock is distributed in stages: rather than beginning by showing us the cause of surprise, Walpole focuses on the organ of seeing, which doubles as a register of emotion: a frantic servant, “his eyes staring,” mutely points toward the courtyard (18). This suspense is accentuated at the level of syntax, in the anticipatory power of a sentence that begins, “The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes…” (18). The theater can deliver instantaneous forms of surprise that the novel cannot; and yet the novel, as Walpole shows, can dilate and anatomize astonishment in equally spectacular ways.15 In this way, Walpole’s techniques anticipate the temporal grammar of cinema, with its capacities of facial close-up, visual and aural editing, slow-motion pacing, and perspectival variety.
Walpole claims in his preface to observe Aristotelian principles, but the reference to classical poetics only serves to remind us of what he flouts.16 Under that rubric, the statue viewing should drive a pivotal moment of recognition; instead, it is the first in a cascade of shocking, symbolically charged events. Anagnorisis ought to be generated by plot and character rather than by artificially imposed tokens, but Walpole defies that rule by liberally scattering his narrative with contrived portents: a portrait, a birthmark, a speaking skeleton, a prophetic quatrain inscribed on a saber. The detailed anatomies of their emotional impact suggest that Walpole cared less about the poetics of plot construction than about the interiority of his characters. In the eighteenth century, as Terence Cave has remarked, anagnorisis became psychologized, and Walpole’s narrative exemplifies that turn.17
Beneath the novel’s bizarre occurrences, there is the shock of consciousness itself: as in the Kantian sublime, the true source of awe lies in the human mind.18 Ordinary objects and happenings can be experienced as extraordinary jolts and as intimations of suprahuman forces. An emblematic scene in Otranto occurs when Isabella, who has fled to a “subterraneous cavern,” is plunged into darkness when a “sudden gust of wind” extinguishes her lamp (28). This is the easiest kind of shock effect to pull off, and an easily parodied one, as Austen would demonstrate in Northanger Abbey, when the same thing happens to Catherine Morland; but it has a paradigmatic force. Rather than disclosing a supernatural agency in the world, such moments reveal a mode of thinking about the supernatural. In counterpoint to Isabella’s plunge into darkness, an equally sudden gleam of moonlight shows the heroine the way to her rescuer, Theodore; and another ray shines directly on a lucky trapdoor (30). Under Manfred’s interrogation, Theodore insists that it is Providence—the startling conjunction of moon and trapdoor, of lock and key—that enabled him to escape with Isabella (32). Though Manfred’s skepticism about that belief seems to be corrected by the novel’s justice-dealing outcome, Walpole’s dialogic approach to the issue of divine assistance allows for the possibility that all intimations of Providence are wishful tricks of the mind—that a surprising gleam of moonlight is no more a heavenly visitation than a sudden gust of wind.19
In Otranto, the supernatural serves as vehicle for states of emotional excitation and as symbolic adjunct for human activity, but in The Italian it disappears entirely; indeed, Radcliffe is best known as a gothic writer of “the supernatural explained.”20 In essence, Radcliffe completed Walpole’s movement from supernatural events to tricks of the mind. When Radcliffe set the frame narrative of her last published novel, The Italian, in 1764, she might have chosen the exact publication year of Otranto as a way of signaling her own contribution to an emerging genre. In any case, she locates astonishment and horror in the recent historical past rather than in a fantastic medieval limbo. In the frame narrative, English travelers visiting Naples acquire the manuscript that forms the bulk of the novel, and the recounted events date merely to 1758. In an encounter that sets the emotional tenor of the novel, visitors to the Church of the Black Penitents startle a mysterious cloaked figure, who suddenly rushes out of sight. A helpful friar explains that the stranger is an assassin who has taken sanctuary in the church; and the ensuing conversation reflects the cognitive structure that undergirds the entire novel. “This is astonishing!” says the Englishman—to which the friar responds that “assassinations are so frequent, that, if we were to shew no mercy to such unfortunate persons, our cities would be half depopulated” (7). The friar’s blasé familiarity thus becomes its own cause for surprise; and so begins the novel’s oscillation between surprise and its rational dissolution. As a stranger in a strange land, the Englishman focalizes shock in the same way that Catherine Morland will do in Northanger Abbey as she learns the ways of an unfamiliar social environment.
Like Otranto, The Italian is crowded with episodes of astonishment, but they are all driven by ordinary happenings. Characters are susceptible to fears and superstitions, but these are revealed to have no rational grounding. This is Radcliffe’s Johnsonian assessment of the hero’s state of “interested” passion and “awakened” fancy: “he would, perhaps, have been somewhat disappointed to have descended suddenly from the region of fearful sublimity, to which he had soared—the world of terrible shadows!—to the earth, on which he daily walked, and to an explanation simply natural.”21 Like Otranto, The Italian features a vexed love match, buried familial connections, murderous plots, and startled recognitions. The hero, Vincento di Vivaldi, falls in love with the apparently low-born Ellena Rosalba, but his mother the marchesa conspires against the attachment with the help of her Machiavellian confessor, Schedoni. The plot involves dual abductions and sequestrations—Ellena forced into holy orders and Vincento brought before the Inquisition on false charges—both of which are ultimately reversed after it emerges (mistakenly) that in a previous life Schedoni was a dissolute nobleman who fathered Ellena.
The narrative rhythm of The Italian is driven by the startle reflex: all characters, both the good and the villainous, are vulnerable to sudden noises and tricks of the mind. Building on Walpole’s attention to perceptual impressions, Radcliffe develops a thoroughgoing narrative phenomenology: scenes of occluded vision and anxious surmise, the spectacle of bodies moving in and out of darkness, the jolt of sounds and voices, the time lapse of fainting or sleeping and returning to consciousness. Walpole delays a shocking sight at the level of narrative syntax, but Radcliffe raises the pitch of anxiety by representing delay within a character’s consciousness, employing the typographical resources of dashes and exclamation points.22 In one scene, for instance, Vincento fears that Ellena has died, and the narrative dramatically registers his surprise and relief when the dead body turns out to be that of her duenna: “Approaching the bed on which the corpse was laid, he raised his eyes to the mourner who hung weeping over it and beheld—Ellena! Who, surprised by this sudden intrusion, and by the agitation of Vivaldi, repeatedly demanded the occasion of it” (53). It is easy to take for granted the modern narrative technique of showing only what a character perceives or gradually figures out, or the intimate description of a character waking from sleep or swoon, or the interjection that serves as perceptual shorthand rather than stagey aside; but Radcliffe deserves credit for developing and popularizing these mimetic données.
The suitors who vie for Catherine Morland’s affections embody two different eighteenth-century models of surprise—what could be called the sexual and the rhetorical. While the hypermasculine John Thorpe recalls, in more polite form, the physical aggression of Mr B, the witty Henry Tilney purveys the novel thrill of raillery and flirtation. In short, the prospect of “Pamela surpriz’d” in 1740 has a very different resonance from the scenario of “Catherine surprized” in 1797–98 (when Austen wrote the manuscript) or in 1818 (when the novel was posthumously published). In this early specimen of Austen’s fiction, men wield the power to shock and generally profess immunity to surprise themselves; but in later novels, that imbalance changes with the creation of heroines such as Elizabeth Bennet, whose capacity to stun Lady Catherine is analogous to Joseph Andrews’s pivotal surprise of his social superior, Lady Booby. In Radcliffe’s narrative, as I have suggested, surprise has a gender-based leveling function, in that everyone can be startled. This is not quite the case in the rhetorical world of Northanger Abbey, because Austen is more interested in the poses of unsurprisability that male characters adopt as both attractive plumage and defensive shield.
Samuel Johnson’s commentary on the avoidance of surprise can help us think further about this stance in Northanger Abbey. In a locution that anticipates the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, Johnson suggests that resis tance to surprise is a mark of stoic survival:
It is a maxim commonly received, that a wise man is never surprised, and perhaps this exemption from astonishment may be imagined to proceed from such a prospect into futurity, as gave previous intimation of those evils which often fall unexpected upon others that have less foresight. But the truth is, that things to come, except when they approach very nearly, are equally hidden from men of all degrees of understanding; and if a wise man is not amazed at sudden occurrences, it is not that he has thought more, but less upon futurity.…He is not surprised because he is not disappointed, and he escapes disappointment because he never forms any expectations.23
The “wisdom” of such stoic cauterization of the imagination is not easily put into practice, and Johnson surely knew as much. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen seems to parody Johnson’s wisdom, or at least the moral vocabulary that it epitomizes: “Your letter came quite as soon as I expected, and so your letters will always do, because I have made it a rule not to expect them till they come, in which I think I consult the ease of us both.”24 Surely, Austen’s expectations do outstrip the actual pace of the world, and she would like to hear even more frequently from her sister; the comic redundancy of expecting a letter only when it arrives wittily suggests the impossibility of Johnson’s desideratum. In Austen’s world, and perhaps still in our own, there is such a thing as postal surprise, the slight shock of the mundane: though the two sisters corresponded regularly, Austen often began her letters by expressing amazed gratification at receiving another one from Cassandra, or by imagining the surprise of her correspondent. For Austen, a letter is surprising because it arrives either earlier or later than expected; though it is the most common thing in the world, it is still remarkable that it comes at all.
As the destined hero of Catherine’s romance, Henry Tilney functions as the heroine’s tutor in the art and avoidance of surprise, and his role is summarized in a single stroke: “His manner might sometimes surprise, but his meaning must always be just: – and what she did not understand, she was almost as ready to admire, as what she did” (83).25 The distinction between a surprising manner and a just meaning is essentially a function of time: the initial impression that Henry makes is superseded by a deeper acquaintance with reason and truth; and even Henry’s enigmas are held in the good-faith expectation of illumination. This, in little, is the principle—a learning curve of sorts—that drives the narrative of Catherine’s entry into the world. It also sounds remarkably similar to Johnson’s model of wonder dispelled by rationality. Austen’s apologia for Henry’s manner, then, is both a poetics and an ethics—an epistemological and moral justification for the Addisonian pleasure of the imagination. Indeed, Henry’s mode of flirtation fits the neoclassical model of wit, which Addison defines as a remark that is not merely funny but “gives delight and surprise to the reader.”26
Catherine’s first conversation with Henry serves as a seminar in the theory and practice of surprise. In much the same way that the narrator bares the devices of the courtship plot, Henry begins by exposing the conventions of small talk. Hearing that Catherine has been in Bath about a week, he exclaims “Really!” with “affected astonishment” (14). In response to Catherine’s question about why he should seem so amazed, Henry concedes that there is not a good reason, “but some emotion must be raised by your reply, and surprize is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable than any other” (15). Surprise is a socially mediated and articulated emotion, and Henry’s aperçu registers this fact. In terms of conversational etiquette, the feigning of surprise maintains the fiction of interest: the friendly interlocutor may not care about the answer to his question, but he must pretend that he does. More broadly, Henry grasps the Austenian point that in social situations, people must have something to say, no matter how inane. By performing a reaction and then retracting it as fake, Henry cunningly elides what ever emotion he might actually happen to feel. In essence, this gambit functions as a pickup line akin to the latter-day cliché, “Do you come here often?” If there is genuine surprise beneath the smokescreen of archness, it might be interpreted as, “Why haven’t I met you yet?” or, in the plot’s providential frame, “Where have you been all my life?” Surprise, then, is an effective cover emotion, even as it generates an erotic spark in the mental friction of question and answer, action and reaction.
In his playful but self-protective pose of omniscience, Henry presumes not only to predict how his conversation with Catherine will go but also to say how it will have gone as recounted in Catherine’s diary at the end of the day. The ensuing conversation turns once again on conventionalized expectations, and the genuine surprise to be found within a frame of predictability. In response to Catherine’s reply, “Perhaps I keep no journal,” Henry blurts out, “Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one?” (15). Catherine’s “perhaps” is a polite form of contradiction, but Henry’s theatrical echo modulates the word into a term of probability and Catherine into one item in a large sample of young women and typically female behavior. In Henry’s thinking, there is technically always some chance for deviation from a norm but not a very big one. Henry’s incredulity is matched by Catherine’s equally skeptical response: “‘I have sometimes thought,’ said Catherine, doubtingly, ‘whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is – I should not think the superiority was always on our side” (16).
At issue are two intertwined forms of knowability: the general knowledge of female behavior and the specific content of Catherine’s thoughts. In both cases, Henry runs the risk of being wrong, and for once Catherine possesses the power to surprise. It is apt—and not at all surprising—that Henry’s antidote to this predicament takes the form of a quintessential surprise: he simply approaches Catherine unawares and asks, “What are you thinking of so earnestly?” (17). Henry characteristically plays on probabilities: Catherine must be thinking about something, and there is a decent chance that she is thinking about him. In any case, the very presence of a questioning observer determines the nature of the answer: even if Catherine were not thinking about Henry, the question forces her to do so now. Responding to her demurral, Henry quips that there will always be this unspoken thing that he can tease her about in the future, and he is fundamentally right: surprise creates memorable experiences by precipitating something out of the ordinary; and it is a power wielded more by men in the novel than by its women. Insofar as Catherine’s true thoughts are as inaccessible to the reader as they are to Henry, this conversation gestures, finally, to Austen’s move away from the devices of the epistolary novel toward the use of indirect discourse to represent the interiority of her characters.
Within the social script invoked by Henry, then, the element of surprise lies in the mysterious subjectivity of Catherine herself. This is also true of Catherine’s later tête-à-tête with Isabella Thorpe, in which the latter presumes to know how her new friend would have reacted to her growing attachment to James Morland: “You would have told us that we seemed born for each other, or some nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond conception; my cheeks would have been red as your roses” (50). This scene, which takes place in a theater, reflects a world of prescribed roles and situations, in which an emotion can be spoken about rather than had, and courtships are theoretical constructions. Once again, Catherine is startled to be the subject of an effort of mind reading, and once again she must insist that the attempt has been botched: “Indeed you do me injustice; I would not have made so improper a remark on any account; and besides, I am sure it would never have entered my head” (50).
What has or has not entered Catherine’s head is a source of speculation for both characters and readers.27 We might agree with Isabella when she insists that Catherine must have known that John Thorpe was in love with her, and share in Isabella’s incredulity at Catherine’s surprise at the news (105). Indeed, Austen must assure us that the shock is sincere: “Catherine, with all the earnestness of truth, expressed her astonishment at such a charge, protesting her innocence of every thought of Mr. Thorpe’s being in love with her” (104). In defending Catherine, the narrator acknowledges that her professions of ignorance are surprising both to Isabella and to the reader, who has already seen Catherine deflecting Thorpe’s dropped hints of affection. For the reader, the ultimate gratification of surprise lies in the revelation that Catherine is an unwitting virtuoso in the art of the cold shoulder, and for Catherine, it is the new awareness of herself as a sexually desirable woman: “That [Thorpe] should think it worth his while to fancy himself in love with her, was a matter of lively astonishment” (107).
Austen overtly marks Thorpe’s unsuitability for Catherine in his boorishness; more subtly, she indicates it in his defense against surprise—a stance of blasé indifference, as opposed to Henry Tilney’s anticipatory control. He might be expected to show some dismay when, in a conversation about novels, Catherine tactfully exposes his ignorance that Ann Radcliffe wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho, but Thorpe instantly recovers from the shock: “‘No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant” (32). Within a single sentence, Thorpe registers a flicker of chagrin, corrects himself, and launches a fresh salvo against another female novelist by saying, in effect, “Enough about Radcliffe; you know who I really can’t stand is Burney.”
Thorpe’s emotion might almost be called embarrassment, but for the absence of a visible blush. More accurately, it can be called surprise, which is typically registered in a character’s speech: here, in Thorpe’s strange negative-affirmative glissando, “No sure”—an iconic expression akin to “Oh!” or “Of course!” But Thorpe erases his reaction with remarkable speed: now he knows the author of Udolpho, and only this fact matters. Thorpe fundamentally knows that the contents of his mind are inaccessible to Catherine, and that she must simply take him at his word; in this way, ignorance can masquerade as forgetting. For someone so adept at shock absorption, it is apt that Thorpe professes not to have been surprised by anything in Burney’s Camilla, or at least what he has skimmed: “indeed I guessed what sort of stuff must be before I saw it” (32). Thorpe’s charge of predictability is not based on deep or extensive acquaintance with novels, any more than Henry’s remarks about journalizing are informed by vast knowledge of women; but it nevertheless touches upon the concerns of Austen’s narrator. Indeed, it could be said that Austen is apprehensive of readers like Thorpe—or, more subtly, affects an anxiety about them when she acknowledges, toward the end of the novel, that her readers surely know where events are tending. For a reader like Thorpe, knowing how a novel will end amounts to finding no surprise and thus no pleasure; but Austen’s ideal readers discern finergrained surprises despite—and even because of—narrative convention and predictability.
In pitting Thorpe against Henry Tilney as suitors, Austen makes an implicit distinction between two kinds of surprise—between bluster and wit, between unintended comedy and calculated humor. When Thorpe takes Catherine for a ride in his gig, he warns her not to be alarmed by his spirited horse and thus succeeds in thoroughly alarming her. But the melodramatic advisory is belied when the horse goes off “in the quietest manner imaginable” (43). Here again, Catherine’s capacity for bewilderment serves Austen’s satirical purposes. Voicing “grateful surprize” at the horse’s docility, Catherine cannot help wondering why Thorpe would have thought it necessary to scare her, but of course we can: he is a braggart and a “rattle.” And yet while Thorpe’s warning is exposed as masculine bravado, it also has the unintended effect of increasing Catherine’s pleasure, in the sense of passing through a peril unscathed. In the end, Catherine “[gives] herself up to all the enjoyment of air and exercise of the most invigorating kind, in a fine mild day in February, with the consciousness of safety” (44). The emotional contours of Catherine’s ride—the thrill of anticipation, the frisson of danger, the consciousness of safety—are not unlike the dynamics of reading a romance or gothic novel. Thorpe may profess a dislike for such fictions, but he indulges in his own personal romance of equestrian heroism; and Catherine unwittingly participates in the fantasy.
I have said that Austen’s defense of Henry Tilney as surprising-yet-just functions as both an ethics and poetics, and the full import of this proposition emerges in a later scene in which Henry dances with Catherine, a flirtation that fluctuates between affected and genuine surprise. Henry suggests that the country dance is itself “an emblem of marriage” (54), but Catherine cannot fathom how a lifelong commitment can be likened to something as frivolous and ephemeral as an eve ning’s dance. Her unfamiliarity with rattles and their gigs is matched by her puzzlement over the subtleties of tenor and vehicle; and Henry further complicates the matter by spinning his analogy the other way around and comparing “the dancing state” to the marriage state. With feigned alarm, he suggests that if Catherine does not see a dancing obligation as having the solemnity of marriage vow, she risks being perceived as an unreliable dance partner: “Have I not reason to fear, that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now [Thorpe] were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?” (55).
Henry’s playful question is overshadowed by a larger concern with sameness and variety, in what amounts to a Burkean consideration of the dulling effects of custom. Looking back on her way of life in Fullerton as devoid of surprise (“One day in the country is exactly like another” [56]), Catherine exclaims, “Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?” (56). To which Henry replies, “Not those who bring such fresh feelings of every sort to it, as you do. But papas and mammas, and brothers and intimate friends are a good deal gone by, to most of the frequenters of Bath – the honest relish of balls and plays, and every-day sights, is past with them” (56). Such disenchantment has been described by Jerome Kagan, in psychological terms, as the fading of surprise from life: “The changes in mood that accompany aging are as much a function of fewer surprises and states of uncertainty as they are the inevitable consequence of compromised organs and the wearing away of the ends of chromosomes.”28 In witty illustration of Henry’s reference to disaffected “papas and mamas,” Austen stages the sudden arrival of General Tilney, a widower and a creature of clockwork routine, not to mention the would-be agent against Catherine and Henry’s happiness.
And yet the general’s appearance becomes the occasion for a form of mutual surprise. This older man may well have tired of dances, but he finds fresh interest in regarding Catherine; in turn, Catherine is unnerved to find herself watched by a strange man. Perpetually startled by the discovery of familial and social connections, Catherine here voices her reaction to General Tilney’s identity in a single expletive, which the narrator describes as “an ‘Oh!’ expressing everything needful” (57). What is “needful” is left unsaid, but the startled monosyllable can be interpreted as a release of nervous energy from the banter of the son and the gaze of the father. Everything in this feeling—the intellectual heat of conversation, the erotic thrill of watching and being watched—is coyly translated into a euphemistic “secret remark” that Catherine makes only to herself: “How handsome a family they are!” The physical and mental delight that Catherine has taken in the evening is finally summarized in her departure, in a moment of exhilaration that recalls the ride in Thorpe’s gig: “her spirits danced within her, as she danced in her chair all the way home” (57). In the emphatic repetition of the verb, the eve ning’s ball has an afterlife as both trope and reenactment; it is a movement of both body and soul.
Beyond the delight of novelty, the expression of surprise frequently serves as a judgment of other people’s behavior—whether deliberate, as in the statement, “you surprise me,” or implicit, as in Catherine’s unstudied reactions. When Catherine sees Isabella, recently betrothed to James Morland, dancing with Frederick Tilney, her shock functions as a lever of moral judgment: both a reflection of her naïveté about the flirtatious customs of assembly rooms and a register of her high expectations of Isabella’s behavior. Whereas Henry offered a metaphor of marriage as dance, Catherine insists on a metonymy—the ethical connection between a social engagement and a betrothal. Henry had meant, in an Augustan turn of wit, to surprise and delight Catherine with an instructive trope; but Catherine means to assert real social consequences.
Henry’s response to Catherine’s shock is a telling mixture of masculine knowingness and gallant sympathy, of jaded resis tance to surprise and vicarious participation in it. First, he says, “I cannot take surprize to myself on that head,” but adds: “You bid me be surprized on your friend’s [Isabella’s] account, and therefore I am; but as for my brother, his conduct in the business, I must own, has been no more than I believed him perfectly equal to” (96–97). Catherine’s fears are confirmed after Isabella jilts James Morland, and this time Henry is genuinely taken aback. Watching Catherine reading the news in a letter from James, Henry shares the éclat, but the sudden arrival of the General conveniently releases him from betraying any emotion: “He was prevented, however, from even looking his surprize by his father’s entrance” (149). In the event, he professes that “my surprize would be greater at Frederick’s marrying her” (150), but then assures Catherine that this will not come to pass, presumably because he knows his brother’s mind. On further reflection, he allows that such a marriage is possible, with the world-weary disclaimer that “Frederick will not be the first man who has chosen a wife with less sense than his family expected” (151). In this way, Henry has it both ways, first claiming knowledge of his brother’s character and then assuming a more jaded knowledge of the world. In a distinctly gendered contrast, his sister Eleanor empathetically expresses her “concern and surprize,” without qualification.
Throughout the novel, Henry lectures Catherine on the probable, most memorably in rebuke of Catherine’s gothic fantasy that General Tilney has imprisoned or murdered his wife; and yet as the affair of Isabella and James illustrates, there are limitations to Henry’s language of rational judgment.29 Like other characters, he makes double-sided predictions and professes in retrospect to have seen all possibilities. On the one hand, he declares that his brother will never marry Isabella Thorpe; on the other, he says that such rashness would not be so surprising in the spectrum of human behavior. Under the cover of worldly sagacity, that is, he says precisely nothing. Catherine’s lament, “I never was so deceived in any one’s character in my life before,” might be seen as a reflection of naïveté about the ways of an obvious flirt, and Henry’s tart postscript—“Among all the great variety that you have known and studied” (152)—emphasizes that point. And yet Henry’s purportedly broad acquaintance with human variety merely derives from what he has seen in Oxford and Bath; and the invocation of statistical sampling avant la lettre does not offer a heartening lesson in moral judgment. Much critical attention has been paid to Catherine’s alarm at the Abbey and its aftermath, but it is equally important to see the ethical dimensions of the little moments of surprise that lead up to the novel’s famous climax, in which the heroine’s “visions of romance” are said to come to an end.
From the very first sentence of Northanger Abbey, Austen introduces the principle of surprise that will animate the narrative: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (5). It is telling that Catherine’s putative unsuitability is framed within the form of a prediction, since this is a favorite activity of the novel’s characters; and the question of whether an unremarkable girl will grow up to be a heroine will be mirrored in the question, as the novel hastens toward its conclusion, of whether a disappointed young woman will find happiness. The surprise in each case is rhetorical rather than actual. Indeed, Austen’s opening statement describes a virtual surprise. Within the world of the novel, no one would expect Catherine to grow up to be a “heroine” because the designation would be on no one’s mind; and in the literary marketplace, readers acquainted with middling characters, such as Burney’s Evelina, would not necessarily be surprised by Catherine’s ordinariness. Though Catherine herself never quite becomes the heroine of the gothic romance she imagines for herself, she is, by definition, the heroine of the novel; and Austen telegraphs her awareness that once Catherine is identified as such, her matrimonial destiny will come as no surprise at all. Less surprising than Catherine’s status, then, is Austen’s style of presenting her—through arch commentary that anticipates Lord Byron’s ostentatiously self-reflexive search for a hero in the opening of Don Juan.30
There is nothing startling, then, about the fundamental plot of Northanger Abbey; and yet within the framework of inevitability, the narrative reminds us of the chanciness of the protagonist’s elevation to the status of “heroine.” Ultimately, the person most surprised to find Catherine grow up to become a heroine is Catherine, whose desires are at least partially occluded, both from the reader and from herself. I would like to look at two homologous scenes of deliberate waiting in order to show the indirection of wish fulfillment: the mechanism of surprise by which Catherine is rewarded, and the rhetoric of probability, stoic resignation, and providential design that surrounds each event. Both are scenes of seemingly interminable boredom or languor followed by a sudden appearance: in one, a burst of sunshine; in the other, a person. And both play on the frisson of the providential or supernatural in gothic narratives of perception.
The scene in which Catherine anxiously waits out a morning drizzle to keep an engagement to walk with Henry and Eleanor Tilney is emblematic for several reasons. In a novel that so firmly announces the Englishness of its setting and idiom, the ordinary dreariness of morning rain is the tonal counterpoint to the gothic storminess of Catherine’s nocturnal vigil at the Abbey. Rather than making the rain allegorically mean something, Austen is interested in the meanings that her characters attribute to it. The scene, in other words, is a test case in the kind of providential thinking that characterizes both earlier realist fiction and gothic romance. Though weather is the quintessential symbol of chance and unpredictability, it invites the confident talk of probability to which most of the characters in the novel are addicted. Catherine’s unflappable chaperone Mrs. Allen offers empty assurance (“She had no doubt in the world of its being a very fine day, if the clouds would only go off and the sun keep out” [58]) and, as the rain continues to fall, an equally vapid prediction (“If it keeps raining, the streets will be very wet” [58]). These tautologies represent a common desire to fill the tedious space of waiting with speech, to give the semblance of knowledge and control in the face of the inscrutable or unpredictable. Mrs. Allen’s disposition is cousin to Miss Bates’s comic loquacity in Emma, but with a difference. If, as D.A. Miller has observed, Miss Bates’s urge to say everything is at odds with the novelistic structure of withholding and delay (40), Mrs. Allen’s “predictions” offer no factual value but mark the space of waiting and deferral on which the novel thrives. When the sun finally does come out, Mrs. Allen insists that she “had always thought it would clear up” (59); and like Thorpe’s disclaimer that he simply forgot about the authorship of Udolpho, this is a claim that cannot be objectively verified. In essence, Mrs. Allen’s statements are hyperbolic versions of Henry’s probabilistic generalizations; both are defenses against surprise employed by those who must always be right.
The effect of the clearing sky on Catherine, meanwhile, recapitulates gothic shock in a benign key: “A gleam of sunshine took her quite by surprize; she looked round; the clouds were parting, and she instantly returned to the window to watch over and encourage the happy appearance” (59). If, as Burke’s etymological observation reminds us, thunder is the figure of astonishment, the gleam of sunshine could be called the objective correlative of surprise. It might seem odd that Catherine could be startled by this, since she has been so ardently waiting for it; but her reaction indicates that she has lapsed into disappointed inattention. As in Austen’s regular correspondence with Cassandra, the most mundane experience of expectation and fulfillment—the shock of the “new” no matter how ordinary—can produce a gratifying surprise.
More subtly, an element of the supernatural (albeit in comic form) attends the scene. It is precisely at the moment that Catherine gives up the vigil that her prayer is answered. No prayer has been offered, of course, and no divine intervention is invoked, but Austen’s description of the moment wittily registers a species of magical thinking, a mixture of Catherine’s eager encouragement and the firmament’s participation: “the sky began voluntarily to clear” (59). The diarist of Robinson Crusoe turns the weather into a sermonic emblem of providence, but in Austen’s secular treatment, it is an occasion for wry observation of human impulses to predict and interpret. Austen’s attribution of voluntariness to a natural event cuts two ways. It wittily suggests that the sky decides to clear on its own, in de pen dent of what anyone has to say about it; but it also intimates a wishful alignment of human volition with the phenomenal world. The ray of sunshine, then, is the daylight counterpoint to the lunar mood lighting in Otranto; but it is also part of Austen’s subtler commentary on providential thinking in the novel, which cuts across the generic boundary between romance and the real. Like Isabella in Otranto, Catherine—trapped in a drawing room rather than a cavern—intuitively feels the surprise of sudden illumination as a response to her desire. It is not only in the most obvious moments of alarm that Catherine shows an affinity to gothic heroines; it is also in these quieter moments.
This meteorological set piece is interlaced, causally and symbolically, with ensuing events; and as in gothic narrative, exterior phenomena not only impinge upon thought but represent thought itself. The sun’s reappearance prefigures the unexpected arrival of “the same three people that had surprized [Catherine] so much a few mornings back” (59)—Isabella and John Thorpe, and her brother James. Isabella represents the plan as a sudden flash of inspiration, the mental equivalent of the gleam of sunshine: “it darted into our heads at breakfast-time; I verily believe at the same instant” (60). Their brainstorm exerts the same kind of force on Catherine as the rain itself: it takes her off guard and interferes with her plan of taking a walk with the Tilneys. The two moments aptly represent the frustration of Catherine’s expectations by larger forces. For Catherine, the unannounced appearance of James Morland and the Thorpes is a bolt from the blue, and its coincidence with a standing engagement might even seem like a conspiracy against her growing intimacy with the Tilneys.
Indeed, this moment recalls the scene in which Catherine first meets the Thorpes, when she is utterly “surprized” to learn that John knows her brother (20). The natural explanation for the connection is that the two men are university acquaintances, but Catherine’s momentary bewilderment registers the presence of a male social network beyond her field of knowledge. This feeling overcomes Catherine more intensely when she later sees with “surprize” Thorpe talking with General Tilney at the theater; and she feels “something more than surprize when she thought she could perceive herself the object of their attention and discourse” (68). “How came Mr. Thorpe to know your father?” a concerned Catherine asks Henry. The pedestrian answer bespeaks yet another inaccessible masculine sphere: the two met each other at a coffee house in Covent Garden. In terms of probability, it is not at all surprising that two men of the same social echelon might discover a mutual acquaintance, but from Catherine’s limited perspective, it is a remarkable coincidence that she happens to know both of them. The name for the darker extreme of Catherine’s surprise at previously unknown connections is paranoia: Why do these people know each other and what could they be talking about when I am not around? What ever name might be given to the ineffable feeling that is “more than surprize,” the events of the novel justify Catherine’s alarm. Thorpe immediately confesses that he was talking about her (69), and it will later be revealed that he overstated the financial prosperity of the Morland family, thereby inflating General Tilney’s opinion of Catherine and indirectly precipitating her ejection from the Tilneys’ social sphere.
The domestic situation that ensues in the wake of that banishment plays as a comedy of humors in which the heroine’s lingering alarm is dialogically counterposed by blithe parental unflappability. Describing her daughter’s sudden return home, Mrs. Morland reports that “Catherine took us quite by surprize yesterday eve ning” but rounds off her narrative with the pleasant discovery that the young woman has turned out not to be “a poor helpless creature” after all (176). Meanwhile, the language of probability in which Catherine received tutelage under Henry Tilney returns as farce. When her daughter despairs of continuing her friendship with Eleanor (and, implicitly, Henry), Mrs. Morland insists that “It is ten to one but you are thrown together again in the course of a few years; and then what a pleasure it will be!” (175). And yet a few pages later, her mother uses the same locution to say that she should not worry about suffering any further at the hands of the tyrant who banished her: “Then you are fretting about General Tilney, and that is very simple of you: for ten to one whether you ever see him again” (178). As with Mrs. Allen, Austen has a fine satirical ear for the way that people talk about the unpredictable, but something more is going on in these comments. Coming so close to the end of the novel, they speak in probabilistic terms of a chance that has already been determined by the narrator. On the wayward paths of romance, separated characters always meet each other again.
The scene of Henry’s one-in-ten arrival at the Morlands strikingly parallels the earlier scene in which Catherine waits out the rain: both are periods of indoor tedium taken up with talk of imminent improvement, broken by a sudden clearing of the literal or figurative skies. And yet the scene at the Morlands’ house represents an objectless waiting, a spell of boredom with no scheduled rendezvous or articulated desire. Austen narrates Henry’s sudden arrival in a notably different manner from the way that she describes other pivotal surprises, such as the arrival of the Thorpes after the rainstorm, the discovery of the linen bill, or the sudden noises that jolt Catherine out of her reveries at the abbey. Henry’s reappearance is reported indirectly: we do not hear the knock on the door or see him enter the room; rather, we see him already in the room, through Mrs. Morland’s eyes. In the quarter of an hour that she has been upstairs looking for an article in the Mirror about “young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance” (178), Henry has magically arrived. In this splendid coincidence, the verbal consolation of moralistic journalism is supplanted by the physical presence of Henry himself:
Her avocations above having shut out all noise but what she created herself, she knew not that a visitor had arrived within the last few minutes, till, on entering the room, the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before. With a look of much respect, she immediately rose, and being introduced to her by her conscious daughter as ‘Mr. Henry Tilney,’ with the embarrassment of real sensibility began to apologise for his appearance there, acknowledging that after what had passed he had little right to expect a welcome at Fullerton, and stating his impatience to be assured of Miss Morland’s having reached her home in safety, as the cause of his intrusion. (179)
The structure of perceptual delay here owes much to the techniques of suspense I have articulated in Walpole’s and Radcliffe’s narratives. In a progressive staging of surprise—Mrs. Morland’s and the reader’s—Henry appears first as a mysterious “visitor,” then a visual “object,” a distinguished-looking “young man,” and finally a “Mr. Henry Tilney” whose awkward prolixity tumbles out in a syntactic tangle of indirect speech. The richly suggestive adjective “conscious” (a word that Burney had often applied to her own thought-laden characters) implies several things: Catherine’s full awareness of the visitor in contrast to her mother’s blithe obliviousness; her recent recovery from the shock of Henry’s unannounced visit; and her social presence of mind to introduce the handsome stranger to her mother. Catherine’s full consciousness, brimming with unspoken things, is analogous to Henry’s “embarrassment of real sensibility”—the feeling of being the subject of conversation, the sense of needing to apologize for “strange” happenings at the abbey. On the home turf of Fullerton, it is Henry’s turn to be on display: Mrs. Morland’s discovery of this new “object” echoes the scene in which General Tilney first gazes at Catherine in the public rooms of Bath. With symmetrical deliberateness, Austen gives two parents in the novel a chance to be instantaneously smitten with their respective children-in-law. In a strangely felicitous way, the sudden entrance enacts the mocking figure of speech with which Henry had banished the possibility of Catherine’s not keeping a journal: “Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.” A moment before Henry’s arrival, however, there was plenty of doubt about whether the two would ever sit in the same room again—whether the chances were ten to one in favor of or one in ten against a reunion.
The surprise in this scene is represented entirely by indirection: the perspective of Mrs. Morland, Catherine’s “perplexity of words” in response to Henry, and a summary of Catherine’s reaction to Henry’s declaration of affection. After so many memorable scenes of banter between Catherine and Henry, Austen’s synoptic mode is notable. In part, it allows the narrator to avoid the more overt language of sentimental fiction, but it does more than this. On one hand, it is an elliptical mimesis of Catherine’s speechless surprise; on the other hand, it deftly acknowledges the reader’s unsurprise. Why quote Henry’s declaration of affection at length when we have suspected it all along? Indeed, what the reader knows is what Catherine and Henry have tacitly realized: “She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own” (180). “Perhaps”? The tentative qualifier, used by Catherine when she demurely suggests that she might not keep a journal, here indicates both the inaccessibility of the characters’ secret thoughts to the narrator and the ultimate unknowability of Catherine and Henry to each other. Each has speculated, in probabilistic fashion, that perhaps the other feels a genuine affection. Finally, the surprise that Austen keeps in her narrative quiver is not the news of the affection but its genesis in Henry’s mind:
though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own. (180)
The emotion associated with Henry’s discovery of Catherine’s affection is fastidiously identified as gratitude, the shock of revelation bypassed on the way to perfect happiness. In this feint, surprise itself is relocated to the aesthetic realm of the reader’s response, to the mimetic field of novels and romances. Of course, this “new” phenomenon of mediated desire is a regular feature of common life; like the peculiar status of Catherine as heroine, the revealed genesis of Henry’s affection is a virtual surprise. More to the point, the peculiar circularity of Henry and Catherine’s romance presents a special exception to the fiction of feminine modesty that Ruth Yeazell has discerned in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century conduct books: “Not until young gentlemen ‘declare themselves,’ as the idiom has it, will female consciousness—and sexuality—be awakened.”31 What makes the outcome of Catherine and Henry’s indirect courtship “new” is that Henry does not “declare himself” in the usual way, nor does Catherine have to play the part of reluctant lover; indeed, according to the narrator’s précis of the conversation, Catherine’s profession of love daringly precedes Henry’s. The mutuality of their affection is, in effect, a simultaneous surprise to both.
In a novel that only briefly and satirically flirts with the most obvious conventions of gothic horror, it is surprise—inflected by subtler gothic techniques—that occupies the emotional center. The novel does assert some cause for alarm (about the mercenary nature of marriage matches, about the snobbery and callousness of men like General Tilney), but it is the recurring experience of surprise that drives that narrative—an experience, unlike alarm, that encompasses both discomfort and pleasure. Under the rubric of modern psychology, surprise is an important experience of cognitive development; and in the terms of Augustan criticism, it is a necessary component of wit and novelty. By making her heroine an easily surprised character in a world of jaded ones, it is clear that Austen makes comic light of youthful naïveté; but she also assays the shortcomings of the language of probability and predictability—the defenses against surprise and speechlessness.
Catherine’s susceptibility to surprise confirms her naïveté; it is an affective counterpart to the blush or the refusal, even as it reflects a poetic principle underlying the novel itself. In essence, the moral ideology of that susceptibility intersects with Austen’s aesthetic ambition—to surprise the reader with something new (even if that novelty is sometimes placed in inverted commas). The success of both of these things depends on a peculiar mixture of knowing and unknowing. In the manner of Henry Tilney’s lexical discriminations, we might make a distinction between two forms of surprise, the cognitive and the emotional, or the newer and older senses of the word. On the level of probabilistic thinking and narrative convention, the reader, like most of the characters in the novel, can boast of expecting the outcome; but in the more elusive realm of affective response, the reader might feel something like surprise—something like one sister’s letters to another, which are always anticipated precisely when the postman delivers them, and yet always as unexpected as sun on a cloudy day.
Henry Tilney’s remark about mamas and papas wearied and jaded by experience seems prescient of the mature perspective in Persuasion: at the advanced age of twenty-seven, Anne Elliott does not go to the Bath assembly rooms to meet potential mates; she readily confronts the revelation of unexpected news; she is open to a wider range of human possibility; and the few things that do surprise her she neutralizes through long and determined reflection. It is perhaps inevitable that surprise would take on new inflections in a novel that counts time in years rather than weeks, and that concerns recognition more than first impressions, repetition more than novelty, widowhood more than courtship. I want to conclude with a brief consideration of Persuasion as a foil and complement to Northanger Abbey. The polar opposite of Catherine Morland, Anne seems to share the kind of stoic attitude that Austen’s male characters often claim: there is very little in the way of novelty that can startle or disturb Austen’s older heroine. What does surprise Anne—along with the mimetic techniques by which Austen articulates that reaction—therefore bears close examination.
With regard to Northanger Abbey, I have suggested various ways in which we can see the moral and intellectual shadings of Austen’s characters through their capacities for and resis tance to surprise. Surprise exists in dialogical relationships, and in Persuasion, I would like to draw a contrast between the shocks that Sir Walter Elliott is disposed to feel and those that his daughter Anne does. A major function of surprise, as we have seen in Northanger Abbey, is to register what seems out of place—previously unknown connections or crossed social boundaries. This can be called naïveté in Catherine’s case, but Persuasion shows us its darker side, snobbery. Sir Walter most acutely reflects the novel’s preoccupation with social change—the fluctuating fortunes of landed gentry, the growing prosperity of the naval and mercantile classes, and the crossings between these spheres. Forced to rent out Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft and his wife, Sir Walter expresses his own shock at this development by pretending to imagine their surprise: “There are few among the gentlemen of the navy, I imagine, who would not be surprised to find themselves in a house of this description.”32 Even the dead can be shocked by change. At the Great House at Upper Cross, the disorder of the Musgroves and their unruly children startles the ancestors: “The portraits themselves seemed to be staring in astonishment” (67). Austen’s wry aside is a joke on the ancien régime, a witty remark on a style of portraiture, and a visual juxtaposition of eternally frozen sitters and vibrantly living bodies. It is also a witty inversion of the gothic topos of the portrait that causes astonishment and sudden recognition: in this case, it is the living who haunt the dead. If there are statues of surprise, there are also paintings of surprise. And buildings. When Sir Walter discovers that Anne has been using Lady Russell’s carriage to visit her old governess Mrs. Smith, he sniffs, “Westgate-buildings must have been rather surprised by the appearance of a carriage drawn up near its pavement!” (170). As with his comment about naval officers, Sir Walter displaces his own surprise onto someone else—or rather, something else; like the aside about the Musgrove portraits, the remark tellingly attributes affect and moral judgment to material objects, ciphers for long-settled traditions and hierarchies.
These expressions of Sir Walter’s snobbery are comical and inconsequential compared with the deeper surprise that lies in the novel’s prehistory: the father’s stunned and stunning reaction (“great astonishment, great coldness, great silence”) to the idea of a match between his daughter and Captain Frederick Wentworth. Over seven years later, that shock is recapitulated with Wentworth’s return, an occasion to which Anne, forewarned, must “enure herself” (77). It is an emblematic moment, in that Anne typically either anticipates surprises or absorbs them through determined reflection. In Northanger Abbey, as we have seen, the resis tance to surprise is frequently a pose of masculine control or superior omniscience; but with Anne, it is better described as a defensive stoicism schooled by experience.
Anne is not entirely immune to surprise, however, and the scenes in which she is genuinely shocked merit special attention. In concluding, I want to make several claims about the implications of these scenes for Austen’s awareness of the capacities of her art: that the conventional language of surprise has become insufficient mimetic shorthand for more complex emotions; that the exact moment of surprise is so instantaneous and fleeting that it can only be represented through indirection and retrospection; and that the experience is best depicted not through reflexive exclamations but through sensory detail. Through Anne’s subjectivity, Austen pays particularly close attention to what these moments feel like.33 Early in the novel, the shock of meeting Frederick again is conveyed in a cubistic array of gestures and perceptions: “Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full—full of persons and voices—but a few minutes ended it” (84–85). These pregnant “few minutes” hark back to the durations of stunned, staring silence in eighteenth-century fiction; but Austen articulates that hiatus with a combination of external notation (eyes, bodily angles, voices, social conventions) and a hint of subjectivity (a seeming fullness, a mercifully quick ending). The affective convention of representing surprise as a pause of several minutes in which characters say nothing to each other always risked credibility; and Austen dusts off the cliché by more precisely evoking what such a moment might feel like. Various commentators on Persuasion have noticed a new attention to the velleities of thought and feeling in passages such as this; and in this vein, I would describe the development of Austen’s narrative technique as a phenomenology of surprise—a development that owes something to the forms of interiority and perceptual experience we have seen in Walpole and Radcliffe.
Throughout the novel, surprise is an experience that must be recovered from; like a gust of wind, it can only be described through the disturbance it leaves in its wake. During the crisis at Lyme Regis when Frederick proposes that “capable Anne” accompany Henrietta Musgrove back to Upper Cross after Louisa’s concussive fall, the mere verbal gesture is cause for a strangely gratifying frisson. Here, as elsewhere, Austen describes a revival from an ineffable complex of feelings: “She paused a moment to recover from the emotion of hearing herself so spoken of” (133). The moment itself is a sort of blind spot in Anne’s consciousness, and “recovery” is an apt term for its aftereffects in a novel so preoccupied with convalescence. Later in Bath, when Anne runs into Frederick at Molland’s, the surprise is narrated as a sensory experience (“For a few moments she saw nothing before her”), and as a phenomenon of aftershocks: “All the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise were over with her. Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery” (185).
Recovery is precisely at issue in the news of Louisa Musgrove’s engagement to Benwick—in the matter of the former’s restoration from her fall, and in the latter’s emergence from mourning over the death of his fiancée. Just as the report of Isabella Thorpe’s engagement to Frederick Tilney provides an occasion to represent Catherine and Henry’s differing moral reactions, the revelation about Louisa and Benwick serves as a medium through which the feelings of Anne and Captain Wentworth can be partially disclosed, to themselves as much as to the reader. “I confess that I do consider his attaching himself to her, with some surprise,” Wentworth says, adding the self-revelatory remark, “A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!” (192). Anne, meanwhile, is “struck, gratified, confused, and beginning to breathe very quick, and feel a hundred things in a moment” (193). A single participle for the emotion is not enough, and like the earlier scene of meeting Wentworth, this one is represented perceptually. Anne hears her former suitor’s words “in spite of all the various noises of the room, the almost ceaseless slam of the door, and ceaseless buzz of persons walking through” (193). These sensory details, we might say, are half noticed by Anne—“half” is a key prefix in the novel’s affective vocabulary—and half noticed by the narrator. In Anne’s consciousness, they recall the sensory blur (also represented by sounds) of her reunion with Frederick, and from a wide-angled narrative perspective, they represent the numberless goings-on of a world indifferent to the complex emotional adjustments that pass in the minds of a man and a woman talking to each other. The scene is a benefit concert at Bath, the sort of place in which people go to meet and be seen; and the sheer multitude and ceaselessness of this backdrop intimate, in little, the period that Anne and Wentworth have spent apart, the purely mundane and incalculable passage of time.
In a novel so focused on the intertwinement of cognition and sensation, the sound of a dropped pen is the ultimate emblem of surprise—analogous to the gleam of sunshine in Northanger Abbey, and reminiscent of the sudden sounds that punctuate gothic narrative. During her conversation with Captain Harville about the relative constancy of men’s and women’s emotional attachments to each other, Anne is shocked to find that Wentworth is within listening distance when she hears him in the act of writing, just after she’s insisted that women continue to love even “when existence or when hope is gone” (238). The sound of the pen, both exclamation point and caesura, has resonance in both temporal directions. It tells Anne that Wentworth has been here all the while writing (while possibly listening), and it tells us that for the moment he cannot continue that activity. As both a physical accident and a signifier of temporary muteness, the dropped pen eloquently discloses Wentworth’s emotion; it exemplifies surprise’s mixture of the involuntary and the deliberate, the affective and the cognitive. Long after Austen parodied the overt shock effects of Walpole and Radcliffe, she has internalized its models of representing states of heightened sensitivity and absorptive attention; the sound of an ordinary implement inadvertently dropped is a literary echo of the rustlings, creaks, and bumps of gothic romance. In the gothic, such sounds are felt as invasive and monitory: they tell a character that someone (or some supernatural agency) might be watching, listening, or looming; and they force both a new self-awareness and a heightened sense of the surrounding world. The same, without the inflection of the supernatural, can be said of the pen-drop in Persuasion.
Anne’s reaction to the sound resembles the kind of speechless astonishment that had been invoked in earlier eighteenth-century novels for purposes both comic (Henry Fielding) and serious (Sarah Fielding, Walpole, Radcliffe). Though Austen was frequently on the side of Henry Fielding in her wry depiction of emotional extremes, here she grants dignity to Anne’s stunned silence. In the inadvertent disclosure of her own persis tent feelings, Anne essentially surprises herself, and this flush of self-awareness is characteristically somatic: “She could not have immediately uttered another sentence; her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed” (238). Here, surprise is registered as fullness of consciousness, a sudden sense of the meanings of one’s own words—both the embarrassment of having said too much and the triumph of having said precisely what one wanted to say. Wentworth, meanwhile, reveals himself in the letter that he has been writing to Anne, and its effect on her is characteristically narrated not as surprise or astonishment but as a ten-minute interval of cognitive and emotional processing: “Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from” (240).
I have said that Austenian surprise is dialogic, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the subtle articulations of Anne’s emotional state and the Musgroves’ noisy intrusion on this reflective solitude: “They then could see that she looked very ill – were shocked and concerned – and would not stir without her for the world” (241). We can even better appreciate the novel’s phenomenology of surprise in counterpoint with the conventional, reflexive language of shock that so many of Austen’s characters speak. And the most fluent speakers of that language are the members of Anne’s own family, who react to the news of William Elliott’s elopement with Mrs. Clay with a predictable form of self-interested astonishment: “It cannot be doubted that Sir Walter and Elizabeth were shocked and mortified by the loss of their companion, and the discovery of their deception in her” (252). These are the noisy outward expressions of shock, expressions that Henry Tilney knows and manipulates so well in Northanger Abbey; but it is the quiet inner movements of feeling and thought—the pleasurable carriage ride, the burst of sun, the apt metaphor, the dropped pen—by which Austen excites, in the best sense of the term, our wonder.