In
Chapter 14 of Northanger Abbey, during
an outing to the scenic vistas presented by Beechen Cliff looking down on Bath,
Henry Tilney famously gives the heroine Catherine Morland “a lecture on the picturesque” in which “his
instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything
admired by him, and her attention was so earnest, that he became perfectly
satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste”. That passage memorably concludes as follows:
“Delighted
with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once,
Henry suffered the subject [of the picturesque] to decline, and by an easy
transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had
placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them,
waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at
politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.”
Such
Chapter 14 passage is the most obvious, explicit treatment of the picturesque
in NA, and JA’s narrator, with typically understated and undermining irony, has
it both ways. I.e., on the one hand, there is an apparent implication that
Henry’s opinions on aesthetics are just too intellectually elevated for his
bright but insufficiently educated young female companion to fully grasp. On
the other hand, when we read, in Chapter 22, Catherine’s thoughts upon reaching
Northanger Abbey….
“But
now she should not know what was PICTURESQUE when she saw it. Such were her
thoughts, but she kept them to herself…”
…we
may wonder whether the narrator is slyly keeping to herself—but just barely—the highly subversive thought that Henry’s grandiose
pontifications might just be so many castles built on intellectual sand. I.e., he
has become so lost in his intellect that he has lost sight of what is (simply)
beautiful-whereas Catherine retains her clear intuitive vision, and, like Miss
Bates and Queen Gertrude, just sees what is.
And JA
otherwise very cleverly slips in a variety of subliminal prompts here and there
via variants of the word “picture” popping up in narration and dialog, which
broaden this theme of the picturesque in NA into a broader examination not
merely of aesthetics but also of perception, imagination and epistemology---how
we picture our world, how we know what we know. And, as I have opined on many
occasions, I believe that in the end of the day, JA is wickedly suggesting to
us that Catherine is the one who, like JA’s and Scott’s sharp elves, has a
great deal of native ingenuity, sufficient to picture a truer version of
reality to herself than Henry, for all his superior educational accomplishment.
In
that broadened context re the picturesque, then, I now wish to bring to your
attention another layer of meaning contained in a short passage in Chapter 11
of NA, where, I will argue, JA presents us with a disturbing, even grotesque, parody
of the scene on Beechen Cliff. As I have already hinted in my Subject Line, I
will show you John Thorpe in a new light, as Henry Tilney’s dark and disturbing
“Hyde” to Henry Tilney’s “Jekyll” not only in obvious ways such as their
radically different styles of courting of Catherine, but also in the realm of
the picturesque as well.
Cutting to the chase, in Chapter 11
of Northanger Abbey, we read the following exchange between John Thorpe and
Catherine Morland:
JT: "Well, I saw [Henry] at
that moment turn up the Lansdown Road, driving a smart-looking girl."
CM: "Did you indeed?"
JT: "Did upon my soul; knew him
again directly, and he seemed to have got some very pretty cattle too."
This entire post was actually prompted
by a passing suggestion by an Austen scholar that I came across last night,
regarding this Chapter 11 short passage, in which the scholar suggested that
Thorpe, by "some very pretty cattle", was actually referring to the horses pulling Henry's carriage.
At first, I was absorbed in
determining whether this was in fact a proper reading of Thorpe’s curious
choice of words. Was "cattle" really
a slang term actually used to describe carriage horses in JA's day? It seemed
plausible, and it also fit with the fact that Thorpe, for all his
primitiveness, nonetheless often speaks quite colorfully, sprinkling his speech
with all sorts of slang, especially when speaking about his favorite
subject--horses and carriages. He of all people would have been completely up
to date on that subculture’s latest slang. And in that regard, I would not be
surprised if someone with the OED in hand was able to confirm that this usage
was out there during JA's era.
However, either way, even if that does
turn out to have indeed been slang in use when JA wrote NA, I wish to suggest
to you that JA deliberately chose to put that particular slang in John Thorpe’s
mouth for a reason which the OED will never pick up on. I am suggesting that
Thorpe, male chauvinist pig par
excellence, is quite consciously, and with extreme vulgarity, referring, by
"pretty cattle", not to Henry’s horses, but to Henry’s sister, Eleanor Tilney, whose “smart” looks he has just
taken note of in his first comment! In effect, Thorpe is sorta like the American
cowboy in a western, who refers to an attractive woman as a “fine filly”, but obviously, via the word “cattle”,
without even the limited charm of “filly”. Thorpe buys and sells horses at the
drop of a hat, and doesn’t that exact same mentality seem to inform his
attitude toward women he wishes to marry?
In fact, it’s not just about the
very primitive John Thorpe---as I've written in the past, there is a persistent
covert theme running through all of JA's novels, in which she subliminally
suggests that women in her world were treated like animals—when single, hunted
like wild animal prey; and when married, kept & domesticated like farm
animals. JA of course made this sad parallel overt at times in her
letters---think of how she describes her pregnant-again-too-quickly niece Anna
as "poor animal".
And Thorpe is exactly the kind of
misogynist who pictures women this way, reducing them to the status of
non-human beasts. Jill Heydt Stevenson was the first (I believe) to point out
how Thorpe’s boasting about his horses has decidedly sexual connotations.
However, JHS did not realize that this usage of “pretty cattle” by Thorpe is
part and parcel of that same equine sexual innuendo.
I conclude by pointing out a crucial
reason why JA in particular chose for
John Thorpe to refer to Eleanor Tilney as “pretty cattle” as opposed to some
other animal. Perhaps those of you of a scholarly bent who are already very
familiar with the treatment of the picturesque in JA’s writing have guessed
what I am about to point out, which is that Jane Austen’s most famous allusion
to the picturesque theorizing of the giant of the field during her lifetime,
Gilpin, just happens to involve actual “cattle”:
First, here is the famous passage in
chapter 10 of Pride & Prejudice, in
which JA invokes Gilpin:
Then taking the disengaged arm of
Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth to walk by herself. The path just admitted three.
Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness, and immediately said:
"This
walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the avenue."
But
Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them, laughingly answered: "No, no; stay
where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to uncommon advantage.
The PICTURESQUE would be spoilt by admitting a FOURTH. Good-bye." She
then ran gaily off…
And second, here is the passage to which, as dozens of Austen scholars have long since pointed out, Elizabeth is slyly pointing in William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772: “Cattle are so large, that when they ornament a fore-ground, a few are sufficient. Two cows will hardly combine. Three make a good group-either united—or when one is a little removed from the other two. If you increase the group beyond three; one, or more, in proportion, must necessarily be a little detached. This detachment prevents heaviness, and adds VARIETY. It is the same principle applied to cattle, which we before applied to mountains and other objects.”
So,
if you had any reservations about inferring that JA might have John Thorpe
speak so crudely about Eleanor Tilney as “pretty cattle”, I hope that the
above, virtually explicit allusion in P&P to two women and a man as cows or
cattle lays those reservations to rest.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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