brilliant practitioner.
To begin to explore some of these innovations and their connections with truth, let us look at an unremarkable passage that exhibits these formal skills or features. In her earliest novel, Northanger Abbey, the - 277- very ordinary protagonist, Catherine Moreland, has fallen in love with Henry Tilney, only to be separated from him by his father, the selfimportant and manipulative General Tilney. At the conclusion, Henry unexpectedly turns up at Catherine's house, and the lovers are reunited in Austen's typically understated manner. After Catherine's abrupt return home from an extended visit to Bath and then to the Tilneys' estate, Catherine's mother finds her daughter's spirits depressed, and sets out to remedy Catherine's repining with an apt moral essay from The Mirror.
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, he 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 Moreland's having reached her home in safety, as the cause of his intrusion.
The physical space in which this scene takes place is given minimal description: we can only figure out by inference that it is downstairs, and that it contains the preoccupied, listless, disappointed Catherine, for whom Mrs. Moreland went in search of the therapeutic essay 'about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance'-the mother's diagnosis of her daughter's disaffection. All the room contains are the three human figures, with Catherine at 'her work,' occupied with the perennial needlework of middle-class domestic women. Rather than relying on a multitude of physical or descriptive details, Austen chooses to set the scene with the social relations, sketching the concerned mother and the affectionate but distracted daughter, each more or less occupied by a range of domestic chores that are more gestured toward than they are described. In short, the characters are simply situated 'at home.' Into this scene Henry Tilney is inserted without any further detail about his appearance, equipage, or dress. Instead he is furnished with an appropriate social explanation for his call: polite and appropriate concern for the well-being of Catherine, a recent guest and friend of his sister's. Austen's focus here is not on physical space but on social relations, on what brings these three together and on what ties them together-the nets of concern, affection, duty, or responsibility. The author sets her stage with emotional explanations. The paragraph continues by recounting Mrs. Moreland's response to Henry's explanation: -278-
He did not address himself to an uncandid judge or a resentful heart. Far from comprehending him or his sister in their father's misconduct, Mrs. Moreland had been always kindly disposed towards each, and instantly, pleased by his appearance, received him with the simple professions of unaffected benevolence; thanking him for such an attention to her daughter, assuring him that the friends of her children were always welcome there, and intreating him to say not another word of the past.
Again what is conveyed here has little to do with the material world of possessions, objects, and appearances but has all to do with a world of social obligations. Mrs. Moreland and Henry Tilney, who have never before met, initiate a social bond that follows the pattern of deference and obligation. What matters is unaffected benevolence, thanks, and assurance. With that assurance, the three figures in this vaguely sketched interior space are tied together in a clearly delineated social relation of both polite and genuinely concerned conduct.
But while this conventional bond is drawn, it is significant that Austen has chosen to narrate this scene from the perspective of the least knowledgeable figure, for Mrs. Moreland is not aware of the affection between Catherine and Henry. Apart from the conventional benevolence, thanks, and assurance, another separate and entirely different relation exists, and that is the one readers are most attuned to-Catherine's romance with Henry. The narrative pattern of this paragraph has a slightly defamiliarizing effect on the reader, shifting our outlook from the customary one that follows or is embodied within Catherine. The narrative apparatus briefly pulls back to occupy the position of conventional maternal authority. And after providing maternal assurances, the next paragraph turns to Henry's awkward subject position:
He was not ill inclined to obey this request, for, though his heart was greatly relieved by such unlooked-for mildness, it was not just at that moment in his power to say any thing to the purpose. Returning in silence to his seat, therefore, he remained for some minutes most civilly answering all Mrs. Moreland's common remarks about the weather and the roads.
This subsequent conversation is the equivalent of white noise, unimportant filler. Twentieth-century readers may have the advantage of familiarity with hundreds of subsequent domestic romances, and therefore we know what Henry has come for, but what we are explicitly given by the narrator is noise about roads and weather. The principal figure in the landscape has disappeared; nothing has been said about her since -279- the «conscious» (i.e., self-conscious) Catherine introduced Henry a page earlier. After a page of this noise that brings the interaction to a standstill-the equivalent of 'meanwhile back at the ranch'-the narrative finally returns to its customary center of attention:
Catherine meanwhile, — the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish Catherine, — said not a word; but her glowing cheek and brightened eye made her mother trust that this good-natured visit would at least set her heart at ease for a time, and gladly therefore did she lay aside the first volume of the Mirror for a future hour.
Here the narrative explicitly acknowledges and exploits the gap between inside and outside, between the internal happy Catherine, that contradictory list of states of feeling, and the external Catherine, her glowing cheek and brightened eye. The highly compressed description of interior state-six words contained within and demarcated by dashes-is quickly superseded by Mrs. Moreland's kind but obtuse view, with some sly mockery of the supposed efficacy of moral essays (which are always recommended by social commentators, while novels are just as regularly denigrated as distracting if not injurious). In short, ever so briefly the narrative probes inside, beneath the skin, to give us a tantalizing glimpse of what Catherine is really feeling. But instantly that view is withdrawn, and we are brought back to the social surface. The narrative displays its capacity to move within, but it does so only to highlight the disparity between interiority and exteriority.
Thereare several ways to describe this phenomenon. The focus of the whole is not entirely on the gap between inside and outside, for that distinction is largely immaterial to Mrs. Moreland and even to Henry. It could be said that the narrative follows a pattern of increasing interiorization or idealization, starting from firm social relations and moving toward highly individualized happiness. It could also be said that the focus of the narrative circles about this trio until it finally settles briefly on Catherine. All the way through the reader is teased with the contrast between initiated (Catherine and Henry) and uninitiated (Mrs. Moreland). Furthermore, this sequence could be read as a narrative tour de force designed to display technique: the narrator shows off what she can know and what she can tell. This last point implies that the scene involves more than just these three subjects, for it also necessarily contains or implies a narrator and a reader. If the narrator is showing off with a brief flash of what she can do, so too she is staking a sort of claim. -280-
It is Catherine's character and Catherine's decorum or reputation that is safely contained within those dashes: Catherine's feelings are displayed ever so gently and briefly; the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish, Catherine, with glowing cheek and brightened eye ever so delicately suggests a physical body and its pleasures. The narrator exposes an affectionate concern for her creation not at all unlike the maternal affection of Mrs. Moreland (which in turn is not dissimilar from the propriety interest evident in the narrator's phrase 'my heroine'). Unlike earlier passages in the novel where Catherine's capacity for heroism is doubted, and the middle sections of the novel where her naïveté and her fondness for the Gothic make Catherine look very foolish, here the narrator does not make fun of Catherine, but rather seems to express her affection for the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish, Catherine, and, in a way, to privilege these emotions, at least in contrast to the mundane thoughts of the remedial essays that construct girls as correctable objects. Catherine's happiness could easily be mocked or minimized as the giddy feeling of a silly girl, but it is not. One might even say that this novel offers a generic choice, rejecting the exaggerations or extravagances of the Gothic in favor of the humble domestic romance. Here at the end of the novel Catherine's happiness is presented as the appropriate end to her conduct, and marriage to Henry as a suitable reward.
After a lengthy paragraph that takes up most of a page, the narrative finally gets Catherine and Henry alone:
His first purpose was to explain himself, and before they reached Mr. Allen's grounds he had done it so well,
