"the riot is only in your own brain" - spoilers

Since I'm presenting first this week on Gothic conventions and filial (dis)obedience, I thought I'd try to sort through the readings on my blog and make some sense of it all.

Robert Miles lists off some Gothic conventions used as descriptive words for Gothic novels in circulating libraries at the time. Here are a few: ruins, black tower, haunted cavern, castle, abbey, historical romance, legends, ghosts, specter, sorcerer, monks, knights, historical figures, and other exotic names. We can narrow it down a bit further and say that these traits all tend to be dark, ancient, supernatural, religious (Catholic), royal, or foreign. Though General Tilney, as Catherine concludes, is "not perfectly amiable," Henry is not willing to admit that his father's emotional abuse and uncivil behavior are "evil" or on a par with the actions of Gothic, tyrannical fathers because of the discrepancy between the time and setting of Henry's 1790s England and the medieval Europe of Gothic novels. Henry scolds Catherine, "Remember that we are English, that we are Christians." Henry turns out to be more naive than Catherine, and Catherine turns out to be a more intelligent reader of novels. She (like Mary Wollstonecraft and Ann Radcliffe) recognizes Gothic duality: the similarity of a woman being physically locked away in a Gothic novel and Mrs. Tilney being emotionally abused and confined in marriage. Jane Austen never underestimates the "anxieties of common life," because they are just as important and "horrid" or "amazing" or "nice" as the "alarms of romance."

I think during my presentation, I'll briefly go over the historical origins of the Gothic tradition. Miles wants us to recognize the fluidity of the 1790's Gothic novel and see that it is not a "unitary object." The first phase: 1788-1794, began with the antiquarian vogue and the anxieties over the "tottering state of all old structures at the time" and gained significance with the fall of the Bastille and the beginning of the French Revolution. Critics deemed Gothic writers "semi-literate," "social incendiaries" and I can't help but think that the former claim came after the latter. Oh, those silly women writers and readers, what do they know? Simply by being women, they must be semi-literate, and therefore their reformist views must be ill-founded. And so came the distinction, as Miles states, between "high" and "low" art which Jane Austen tears down in her "it's only a novel" rant. The second wave of Gothic novels seemed to be more of a reaction against conservative critics, like Edmund Burke, with their idealization of "medieval," "feudal" or "gothic" values. By 1794, the Gothic was a well-known "way of speaking the unspeakable." Authors depicted gore, bloodshed, and chaos in their tales of "picturesque terror," expressing a culture of revolutionary paranoia.

Frances Chiu delves into the Gothic convention of the tyrannical father which by 1790 was very familiar to readers, and became associated with an outdated, dark, threatening past and was usually represented as a "statesman of high social standing." Reformist discourse often utilized the paternal metaphor, in which unjust political or royal leaders are compared with despotic fathers, in order to challenge tradition and comment on anachronistic laws (such as primogeniture and entailment---hellooo, Pride & Prejudice!). Obedience to the law and to the father were considered absolutely necessary to maintain social order. And so authors began to create this image of a father (“soon-to-be-absent, financially incompetent, uncaring, downright despotic”) and a victimized daughter, tyrranized by her male governors. Jane Austen is so punk rock. Screw the patriarchy! A helpful quote: “The father, his crumbling castle, and his children might be construed respectively as allegorizations of the nation’s political establishment, the corrupt and anachronistic institution of laws, and the ordinary citizen.”

How else does political discontent manifest itself in late-18th century fiction? The idle mother, the bad uncle, the foolish eldest son, and the virtuous and industrious younger son. Mothers become ineffectual, practically non-existent human beings under the power of the father. The bad uncle "staves off prospects of revolutionary violence in England" or directs discontent instead to Prime Minister William Pitt. The characters of the eldest and younger son point out the injustice of laws of primogeniture and entailment (which are not based on reason, but instead on ancient ideals). Does any of this sound familiar!? Every single one of these conventions shows up in Mansfield Park (Lady Bertram reclining on the couch with Pug all day, the unfeeling uncle Sir Thomas, the rakish and rather stupid Tom, and the virtuous Edmund). Anyone who says that Jane Austen rarely deals with politics is sorely mistaken! Every one of her novels contains a father that is “soon-to-be-absent (Mr. Dashwood, Sir Thomas, Mr. Price), financially incompetent (Mr. Bennet), uncaring (Sir Thomas, Sir Walter), downright despotic (General Tilney, both of the Sirs, Mr. Woodhouse--the meanie won't let them eat cake!)," and often portrays an "embittered" relationship between an elder and younger brother (Sense & Sensibility, Northanger Abbey). I'm so glad that I was able to do this reading because it helps me to understand how and where Jane Austen fits in the literary tradition. Austen uses these conventions in a "style entirely new"!

“I leave it to be settled by whomever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience." (Chiu states that: the latter is being championed as “the latter follows as a natural consequence of the former”--So the narrator doesn't really leave it be settled by us. The logic of the statement answers any questions we might have about the author's intentions.) My question for the class: How does Northanger Abbey deal with the topic of filial disobedience? What other Gothic conventions did you notice?

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As for what I thought of the reading this week. I really loved Nobodaddies and Noble Daddies because it revealed all of the conventions that Jane Austen used in her work. The 1790s Miles reading was a bit more dense but also had some interesting information about the formation of the Gothic novel and how historical events affected literature and vice-versa. To be honest, this is why I am so in love with studying literature and history, because there's no such thing as "only a novel." Art reflects and changes life (again, vice versa) and we live our lives more politically than we know. I would be interested to read criticism on contemporary horror just to see how it relates to modern "anxieties of common life." Perhaps the current zombie craze in film has something to do with post-9/11 terrorism anxiety, just like the who-dunnit horror films of the 1990's dealt with anxieties of a disillusioned and apathetic generation.

I can never decide what my favorite Austen novel is, but Northanger Abbey is definitely up there. I adore Catherine, Henry is hilarious (even if he "torments"), and the narration gets its humor by commenting on what is expected of Catherine and the story based on Gothic conventions and then not actually following through. As we were discussing last week, you really don't need to have a great knowledge of Gothic fiction to enjoy the story (I know I didn't have that knowledge when I first read NA), but it certainly makes the experience more revealing and the study of it more fruitful.