that Catherine did not think it could ever be repeated too often. She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own; for, 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.
Represented apart from Mrs. Moreland, these two reach an understanding that is not rendered in dialogue but only reported after the fact; but no veil has been decorously thrown over the pair, for the narrator is capable of describing both Henry's and Catherine's motivations, which, it is implied, are clearer to the narrator and her readers than to -281- the characters. And thereafter, focus on the lovers is dissolved in a direct address of narrator to reader about matters of invention. The arch or wry voice, so typical of Austen, implies that men's attractions to women are very commonly stimulated by women's partialities; but the whole matter of courtship in general, and Henry and Catherine's in particular, has been replaced by the matter of fiction with the terms romance, heroine, and imagination. As so often happens in Northanger Abbey, the narrator insists upon the constructedness of this tale even while she insists that this tale is much more believable and reasonable than the common run of novels, those mere romances that precede it.
With this insistence on fictionality, the scene necessarily comes to be understood as one constructed out of a series of characters situated between the narrator and the reader. And what is understood about character becomes less a matter of realism, depth psychology, and accuracy in portraying life stories, and more a matter of what the novelist can invent and what she chooses to tell. As such, these last few sentences about the heroine's dignity are a fitting end to a passage that has demonstrated the author's magisterial skills at telling. From sentence to sentence it becomes clear that this is less a matter of revealing truth than of the narrator's deciding what she wishes to tell. For the narrative shifts all the way through, from one subject position to another and from one consciousness to another, and finally steps back and sets the three constructed consciousnesses, or subject positions, into a pattern. From a high seat of surveillance, the all-seeing narrator decides what they can know and what we can know. That is, the narrator intrudes into and recedes from interior space at will, at the very same time as she concedes that she is constructing this space.
Little of this swirling, shifting, and variable narration registers with readers because the shifts are rendered so fluid and unmarked through the technique of free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse is the term used for paraphrase or condensed dialogue, presented indirectly by the narrator without the signal of quotation marks or 'he said/she said.' Furthermore, free indirect discourse can dispense with 'she thought/he thought,' so that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is said and what is thought. Consider the following sentence: '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 -282- daughter, assuring him that the friends of her children were always welcome there, and intreating him to say not another word of the past.' It is apparent that the first clause represents Mrs. Moreland's thought-she would not speak of 'his father's misconduct' to Henry; but the rest of the sentence could be a condensation of her genial remarks of welcome, presented indirectly to the reader. While all of this is clear enough in the reading, the intriguing part comes in the all but invisible transition (here signaled only by a semicolon) from thought to speech. It is this very technique that renders character transparent in narrative, enabling the narrative to move fluidly from exteriority to interiority, showing both the inside and the outside of character, mind and body-in this case, individual judgment in the first half of the sentence and social interaction in the second half. It is this technique that enables the novelist to represent both the nature of character and its position in social space, producing the impression of a totality.
Let us compare this early novel with a later one containing a similar encounter between the protagonists. Here, toward the end of Emma, is a paradigmatic moment in Austen's work, as a character carefully analyzes a minute detail of social interaction: Mr. Knightley's acknowledgment of Emma's reparation for her unkindness to Miss Bates at the Box Hill outing. Distressed by Mr. Knightley's condemnation of her thoughtless and cruel sport of Miss Bates, the very next morning a chastened Emma makes a penitent call on the Bateses to make up for her slight. When Mr. Knightley comes to call, her father praises Emma for her attention to the Bateses, praise that both Emma and Mr. Knightley know she does not deserve:
Emma's colour was heightened by this unjust praise; and with a smile, and shake of the head, which spoke much, she looked at Mr. Knightley.-It seemed as if there were an instantaneous impression in her favour, as if his eyes received the truth from her's, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured.-He looked at her with a glow of warm regard. She was warmly gratified-and in another moment still more so, by a little movement of more than common friendliness on his part. He took her hand;-whether she had not herself made the first motion, she could not say-she might, perhaps, have rather offered it-but he took her hand, pressed it, and certainly was on the point of carrying it to his lips-when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go.-Why he should feel such a scruple, why he should change his mind when it was all but done, she could not perceive.-He would have judged better, she thought, if he had not stopped.-The intention, however, was indubitable; and whether it was that his manners had in -283- general so little gallantry, or however else it happened, but she thought nothing became him more.-It was with him, of so simple, yet so dignified a nature.-She could not but recall the attempt with great satisfaction. It spoke such perfect amity.-He left them immediately afterwards-gone in a moment. He always moved with the alertness of a mind which could neither be undecided nor dilatory, but now he seemed more sudden than usual in his disappearance.
Unlike the compact and economical encounter in Northanger Abbey, this whole paragraph focuses on some very slight gestures. Communication, such as it is here, is perfectly silent, gestural, and physical. Various things seem to be communicated: a message of correction, advice taken and acted upon; a message of approval that the advice was taken. There are also distinct undercurrents of desire and the pleasure of physical touch. Emma's desire for Mr. Knightley has yet to be acknowledged by herself, and he has yet to declare himself-so there are several levels of signification here, the most diffuse of which is that Emma's sense of well-being is more dependent on his good opinion than she has yet realized. These undercurrents complicate Emma's relatively simple attempt to indicate that she is in agreement with Mr. Knightley. And because their interaction is gestural, the narrator emphasizes that it is one-sided; the whole paragraph consists of Emma's interpretation of his gestures, punctuated by a whole series of words like seemed, might, and could. The paragraph then consists of an unusual mixture of assurance and tentativeness. The dashes indicate the rapid flow of thought, as Emma quickly runs through all the possible meanings of his gesture. Like the poetry of surmise in Wordsworth's 'Solitary Reaper,' where he tries to understand the Gaelic song-'perhaps the numbers flow / For old, unhappy, far-off things'-the meaning can only be imagined, never known. The most significant difference between the representation of this encounter and that in the earlier novel is that here the narrative does not move around from one character to another; in fact, throughout the novel, we see directly into Mr. Knightley's consciousness only once, and even this insight is qualified by the quotation of Cowper's doubting line, 'Myself creating what I saw.' The present passage is definitely Emma's view of Mr. Knightley, her train of thought. Compared with Northanger Abbey, the narrative here is much more single- minded focusing on Emma's interpretation of what Mr. Knightley may have meant by that gesture. One consequence of such a focus is a -284- powerful sense of interiorization, as if the whole paragraph takes place within Emma's consciousness and exteriority has been diminished to the momentary grasp of the hand. Additionally, by concentrating so insistently in the later novels on the interpretation of others' words and gestures, Austen turns penetration or interpretation of character and the corresponding transparency or opacity of character into an overt theme in the narrative; in passages such as this, characters anatomize what one can know of another. This thematization of opacity occurs when the technique is most assertively transparent-seeing directly into the heart of Emma, we are asked to doubt her capacity to know another. In Emma, this contradiction is particularly rich because Emma always assumes she knows more than she does. But still, while there are impediments, character is knowable here. This thematization presumes a depth of character, a desire to know, and finally, knowability-seeing into the heart of Emma, we are not encouraged to doubt the depth or consistency of her character. In sum, one can stress the power of the narrator, and her motive of order, or one can stress how little the characters can know of others.
To look at an example in the middle of Austen's career, let us turn to Pride and Prejudice. As many have
