In
2007, Ellen Moody wrote that she thought that the opening of
The Recess is parodied by Henry
Tilney in his famous teasing
scare speech to Catherine as they ride along to Northanger Abbey. Today, I will suggest that
Henry Tilney’s speech has a second source as well, which is directly tied to The Recess:
First, here is Henry’s teasing scare speech:
He
smiled, and said, "You have formed a very favourable idea of the
abbey."
"To
be sure, I have. Is not it a fine old place, just like what one reads
about?"
"And
are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as 'what one
reads about' may produce? Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels
and tapestry?"
"Oh!
yes—I do not think I should be easily frightened, because there would be so
many people in the house—and besides, it has never been uninhabited and left
deserted for years, and then the family come back to it unawares, without
giving any notice, as generally happens."
"No,
certainly. We shall not have to explore our way into a hall dimly lighted by
the expiring embers of a wood fire—nor be obliged to spread our beds on the
floor of a room without windows, doors, or furniture. But you must be aware
that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this
kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly
repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy, the
ancient housekeeper, up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages,
into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty
years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive
you when you find yourself in this gloomy chamber—too lofty and extensive for
you, with only the feeble rays of a single lamp to take in its size—its walls
hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark
green stuff or purple velvet, presenting even a funereal appearance? Will not
your heart sink within you?"
"Oh!
But this will not happen to me, I am sure."
"How
fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment! And what will you
discern? Not tables, toilettes, wardrobes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps
the remains of a broken lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts
can open, and over the fireplace the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose
features will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to
withdraw your eyes from it. Dorothy, meanwhile, no less struck by your
appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible
hints. To raise your spirits, moreover, she gives you reason to suppose that
the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that
you will not have a single domestic within call. With this parting cordial she
curtsies off—you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the
last echo can reach you—and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten
your door, you discover, with increased alarm, that it has no lock."
"Oh!
Mr. Tilney, how frightful! This is just like a book! But it cannot really
happen to me. I am sure your housekeeper is not really Dorothy. Well, what
then?"
"Nothing
further to alarm perhaps may occur the first night. After surmounting your
unconquerable horror of the bed, you will retire to rest, and get a few hours'
unquiet slumber. But on the second, or at farthest the third night after your
arrival, you will probably have a violent storm. Peals of thunder so loud as to
seem to shake the edifice to its foundation will roll round the neighbouring
mountains—and during the frightful gusts of wind which accompany it, you will
probably think you discern (for your lamp is not extinguished) one part of the
hanging more violently agitated than the rest. Unable of course to repress your
curiosity in so favourable a moment for indulging it, you will instantly arise,
and throwing your dressing-gown around you, proceed to examine this mystery.
After a very short search, you will discover a division in the tapestry so artfully
constructed as to defy the minutest inspection, and on opening it, a door will
immediately appear—which door, being only secured by massy bars and a padlock,
you will, after a few efforts, succeed in opening—and, with your lamp in your
hand, will pass through it into a small vaulted room."
"No,
indeed; I should be too much frightened to do any such thing."
"What!
Not when Dorothy has given you to understand that there is a secret
subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St.
Anthony, scarcely two miles off? Could you shrink from so simple an adventure?
No, no, you will proceed into this small vaulted room, and through this into
several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one
perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third
the remains of some instrument of torture; but there being nothing in all this
out of the common way, and your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return
towards your own apartment. In repassing through the small vaulted room,
however, your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of
ebony and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before, you had
passed unnoticed. Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly
advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer—but for
some time without discovering anything of importance—perhaps nothing but a
considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring,
an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears—you seize it—it contains
many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own
chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher 'Oh! Thou—whomsoever thou
mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall'—when
your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total
darkness."
"Oh!
No, no—do not say so. Well, go on."
But
Henry was too much amused by the interest he had raised to be able to carry it
farther; he could no longer command solemnity either of subject or voice, and
was obliged to entreat her to use her own fancy in the perusal of Matilda's
woes. Catherine, recollecting herself, grew ashamed of her eagerness, and began
earnestly to assure him that her attention had been fixed without the smallest
apprehension of really meeting with what he related. "Miss Tilney, she was
sure, would never put her into such a chamber as he had described! She was not
at all afraid."
And now
read the first portion of Sir Walter Scott’s short 1814 “Introductory” to Waverley, Or, Tis Sixty Years Since, and
disagree if you dare with my assertion that Henry Tilney’s speech also winks at Scott’s wink at The Recess—winks within winks!:
“The
title of this work has not been chosen without the grave and solid deliberation
which matters of importance demand from the prudent. Even its first, or general
denomination, was the result of no common research or selection, although,
according to the example of my predecessors, I had only to seize upon the most
sounding and euphonic surname that English history or topography affords, and elect
it at once as the title of my work, and the name of my hero…my second or
supplemental title was a matter of much more difficult election, since that,
short as it is, may be held as pledging the author to some special mode of
laying his scene, drawing his characters, and managing his adventures. Had I,
for example, announced in my frontispiece, Waverley,
a Tale of other Days, must not every novel reader have anticipated a castle
scarce less than that of Udolpho of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited,
and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or
housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were
doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the
owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it
have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce
any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish
but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the heroine’s
fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had
heard in the servants’ hall?...”
There’s
no doubt that Jane Austen read Waverly,
because she famously commented on its publication in Letter:
"Walter Scott has no business to write
novels, especially good ones. – It is not fair. He has Fame and Profit enough
as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.– I
do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it – but fear I
must".”
Austen scholars with tin ears for Austen’s
irony have taken this comment literally, as if she, in 1814, especially after
the positive reception of P&P by the literati, actually felt personally
threatened by Scott’s entry into novel-writing. This is absurd. He was writing
a completely different sort of novel than she was, as he himself so eloquently admitted,
in terms of his own limitation to the big Bow-Wow strain”, unable to depict
human character truly as she could.
What I do, however, detect, is a subtle but serious
feminist rebuke of Scott beneath the irony, on a different point. Jane Austen
recognized that Scott was not only invading the turf of the female Gothic
authors like Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, et al, he was staking a false claim (per Diana Wallace in her
excellent recent book about female Gothic historical fiction like The Recess) of having invented
historical fiction with the writing of Waverly.
As Wallace points out, Scott thereby successfully erased the prior claim of Lee
for nearly a couple of centuries, and Jane Austen, for one, was outraged.
And so, how fitting for JA to wink at both
Scott and Lee in Northanger Abbey,
the novel in which she explicitly condemns the erasure or diminishment of
female authors like Burney and Edgeworth from the canon:
“…I
will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with
novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very
performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with
their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and
scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she
accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with
disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of
another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of
it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their
leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with
which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured
body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected
pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species
of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our
foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects
and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a
paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a
thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and
undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which
have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no
novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read
novels—It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant.
"And what are you reading, Miss—?" "Oh! It is only a
novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected
indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or
Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the
mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the
happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and
humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the
same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a
work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though
the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous
publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person
of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of
improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation
which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so
coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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