Northanger Abbey 21-24: “…Or Hardly Working”

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Reclaiming Jane Season 6 Episode 8 | Northanger Abbey 21-24: “Or Hardly Working”

[00:00:00]

Emily: This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.

Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers.

Emily: And I'm Emily Davis Hale.

Lauren: And today, we're reading chapters 22 through 24 of Northanger Abbey through the theme of hard work.

Emily: This was such a good section to have with the theme of hard work. It's so fun. Also, shout out to the person on our social media who noted that last time we missed the skill that Catherine evidently has in opening locked doors. Yeah, that just like totally went over my head, but yeah, girl apparently has some lock picking skills.

I don't know.

Lauren: She was a pickpocket in a past life.

Emily: Clearly.

Lauren: Though may be a discovery in this section might negate that.

Emily: Yeah, maybe.

Lauren: No, this was a really good, a really good section for hard work and we have some surprisingly like lengthy chapters. I think Northanger Abbey tends to have shorter chapters and these, we got a little bit more detail in the three chapters that we read today, so I'm excited to dive into it.

Emily: Yeah, it was a little bit meatier.

Lauren: Exactly.

Emily: Which should be fun for you, our first recap. Are you ready?

Lauren: Yes.

Emily: All right. Three, two, one, go.

Lauren: Okay. Catherine is getting to explore Northanger Abbey with the Tilneys except for Henry leaves on business. And so she's just there with Miss Tilney and with Captain Tilney.

So they show her around the Abbey. She thinks that Captain Tilney has been, or not Captain Tilney, with that the older Tilney has been acting like a little bit weird. And she also finds out a little bit more information about the death of their mother, which [00:02:00] she then gets into her head that the father Tilney actually killed their mother, which is ridiculous.

She starts trying to investigate this. Henry comes home early. She tells him what's going on. He was like, what the hell? And she runs off crying. I skimmed over a lot of stuff, but those were the highlights.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty good. Solid.

Lauren: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Emily, are you ready for your attempt at recapping chapters 22 through 24 in 30 seconds?

Emily: An attempt, yes.

Lauren: Fantastic. That's all we ask. Okay. On your mark, get set, go.

Emily: Catherine first is very disappointed to find in the light of day that the manuscript is just an old laundry bill. General Tilney insists on showing her around the grounds and house, which she is not happy about. But there is mystery afoot because he won't let them see Mrs. Tilney's old room. So Catherine develops all these wild theories and decides that he must be hiding his still living wife in the attic, secretly. But then Henry surprises her while she's skulking around and very promptly disabuses her of this notion.

Lauren: The end. Well done.

Emily: Thank you. The power of note taking.

Lauren: Amen. Yeah, so we, we left off on a cliffhanger of Catherine can't read the mysterious manuscript.

Emily: I love, I love the inflection there. Catherine can't read. That won't stop me because I can't read.

Lauren: That sign can't stop me. The candle's been blown out, the fire's out, it's storming outside. She's found this mysterious manuscript and yet she must wait until the light of day to find out what it contains.

And it's just, it's a laundry bill.

Emily: It's literally just laundry bills.

Lauren: That's it.

Emily: Just that someone had shoved in the back of this cabinet and probably forgotten about, because why would they care?

Lauren: And then she wonders to herself, why would somebody lock away a laundry bill? That doesn't make any sense. And then she realizes, oh. Maybe it was unlocked and I locked it.

Emily: That was so funny. I love the idea that she's just so invested in opening these locked doors that [00:04:00] she didn't try to just open them first. She was just like, 'Oh, it's locked,' and then went to work and locked herself out in the process.

Lauren: The morning does not have quite the dramatic beginning that she thought that it would.

So she's a little bit chastened as she goes down to the breakfast table because, you know, here she is again making up these silly stories and she's just been proven wrong. So at the start of the day, she's like, okay, I'm not going to try and read any more into things. I'm just going to enjoy the day. It lasts for a little bit.

Emily: Only for a little bit, because General Tilney decides that he personally is going to show her around the house. Which, she wants to see the house very much, but thought that it was just going to be her and Eleanor, and Miss Tilney. Which would have been much more fun, because, you know, they can be in each other's confidences, and they can enjoy all the little gothic nooks and crannies, but no, he wants to show off his grounds.

And the property, and all of the improvements that he's made to this gothic abbey, which breaks Catherine's heart every single time.

Lauren: And Catherine's like, I don't wanna see the grounds, I wanna see the mystery!

Emily: Yes! Show good stuff! Show me your stained glass windows! Where are the locked doors?

Lauren: I know I said I was going to stop doing this, but like, dang it, can't a girl enjoy an Abbey?

Why are you taking me outside?

Emily: A single moldering tapestry, come on.

Lauren: I just want just one. A little baby piece of gothicness.

Emily: Alas, they do take their big turn around the grounds with General Tilney showing off all of his stuff and his many hothouses and says super casually that, you know, oh, they only got a hundred pineapples out of the pinery last year.

Lauren: Which is a ridiculously high number, for context.

Emily: Ridiculous.

Lauren: That is really, really hard to do.

Emily: And, of course, he's, you know, asking Catherine very casually about like, oh, well, how many of Mr. Allen's greenhouses does, like, what, what all does his produce? And she's like, he has one that his wife plants things in, but usually they [00:06:00] build a fire in there.

Lauren: Not the same.

Emily: Yeah, they're on completely different levels. And he is clearly very smug about this. He's trying to impress Catherine.

Lauren: 100%. And he has put a lot of work into every aspect of this house. And he just wants somebody else to look at it and affirm him and appreciate it. And he's thrilled that he has a captive audience in Catherine.

He has someone else who's new, who hasn't seen anything. So this is the perfect opportunity for him to show off and like, indulge himself a little bit because upper class, upper middle class English social circles at the time are pretty small. So it's not very often that you have somebody who's brand new to your house where you have the excuse to just talk about like, 'Oh, well, this costs this much money, and I really worked hard on this,' because most of the time it's people who already know all this information. It's just going to be very tedious telling it to them again.

Emily: After their trip around the grounds, he also insists on taking her through the entire house, which she's still not happy about because she wants to get rid of him, but there's no polite way to do that because he's, you know, the owner of the house and his personally volunteered to show her around, so she's stuck with him.

Lauren: She can't really reject the hospitality.

Emily: At least within the house, she does get a couple of little, like, easter eggs of the gothic abbey, because he points out, like the, the wall lines where the old cells and the cloister used to be and stuff like that. But then unfortunately, the fourth wing of the house was demolished and rebuilt by his father, which Catherine is like angry about this.

I'm like, girl, do you understand what structural integrity is?

Lauren: No, no, she does not.

Emily: She definitely does not.

Lauren: Oh, speaking of the things that she doesn't understand also at the breakfast table. So before Henry has left for Woodson, they're talking about the elegance of the breakfast set that's on the table.

And General Tilney is talking about, you know, this is quite an old set. It was purchased a whole two years ago. So now [00:08:00] it's old.

Emily: That just says so much.

Lauren: It says so much, and that the manufacturer was much improved since that time, and he'd seen some beautiful specimens when last in town, and had he not been perfectly without vanity of that kind, might have been tempted to order a new set.

However, the part that Catherine does not pick up on is that the narrator then goes on to say, "he trusted, however, that an opportunity might ere long occur of selecting one, though not for himself. Catherine was probably the only one of the party who did not understand him." Baby girl.

Emily: Banging my head against the table.

He thinks you're gonna marry his son.

Lauren: That is like the most obvious form of encouragement that you could receive of like, you know, maybe one day I might have an occasion to buy a new China set, but not for me! Wink!

Emily: You can hear the wink through the page. It's incredible. But Catherine can't.

Lauren: She's like, oh, I wonder who it'd be for.

That's so nice. Who would the gift be? Babes.

Emily: She's absolutely hopeless. I love her so much, and she's absolutely hopeless.

Lauren: And that just adds another thing to him giving her a tour of the grounds as well, because he does want to brag and he is, you know, indulging a little bit in some pride, but also he's kind of showing her like, hey this could be, you could come here more often.

Henry is a second son, he's not the oldest, so this wouldn't be yours, but!

Emily: But you'd be in the family.

Lauren: You'd be in the family; you could come hang out.

Emily: It's just so obvious. And it's so interesting, too, because clearly by the comparisons he's drawing between his own property and Mr. Allen's, who Catherine was staying with, he knows that they're of different classes.

And it's unexpected to me, I think, to see a man of such apparent consequence very blatantly, like, showing off and bragging. But, you know, maybe that's what it's about. He thinks that she's going to be easily awed, and he wants that kind of attention.

Lauren: Yeah, that's part of it, I think. And maybe just like soothing your own vanity.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren: And I wonder too, how much of, you know, we [00:10:00] see later on in this section that he is still grieving his wife in some ways. And it seems like he's put a lot of effort into the house in the absence of having his wife around. So I wonder if this is his way of saying like, well, this is, this is now where I put all of like, my love and attention. My children?

No.

Emily: Screw them. Yeah.

Lauren: Look at the house.

Emily: The house though. Yeah, it definitely seems like he's, he's sublimated a lot of things into the house because he is so strict about not wanting even Eleanor to go into his wife's room.

Lauren: No. When they're doing the tour of the house it comes up in conversation about this is, this is the wing and area that they don't go to.

And Eleanor doesn't have a problem with it because she would very readily show Catherine like, 'Oh, well, this was my mother's room,' and General Tilney immediately shuts that down, which Catherine interprets as, 'he has something to hide. He must not have cared about his wife.'

Whereas as a reader, you might look at that and say, 'Oh, that's still very upsetting to him. And he doesn't want to go back to a place of like, of bad memories because that was his wife's room and he loved her and she's no longer here. So of course he doesn't want to go there.' But Catherine's like, 'Why would you not want to spend time in that room if you loved her?' From her perspective.

Emily: Yeah. And she's like, you can see the, the math happening in her head.

She's like, well, I think this room is directly above where the old cloisters were and there's that staircase. So I'll bet he's just secreted her down into one of those and one of the locked rooms that he didn't show me there. And then, like, he stays up later after the girls have gone to bed, and she's like, Oh, he must be sneaking coarse food to his trapped wife, and has spun out this whole tale of how he was neglectful and abusive, and it was so suspicious that the children weren't home.

It was only Eleanor who was away when Mrs. Tilney died, but Catherine's imagination will not be stopped at all.

Lauren: And General Tilney, speaking of soothing his vanity, does not really let Catherine get a word in edgewise as they're talking so he'll, he'll pause as though to ask for her input, but [00:12:00] then we'll just fill the space with his own opinion.

So he'll say, Catherine, what would you rather see the grounds or the Abbey? Oh no, the grounds must be the place to go because blah, blah, blah. He really just wants to indulge his own whimsy for the day, but he will make it seem as though he's actually asking Catherine what it is that she'd like to do.

But he really just will, in a very Mrs. Jennings kind of way, actually, just keep talking.

Emily: Yes, definitely. On that topic of sort of his own self importance, I guess, and also tying into our theme today of hard work, I thought it was very fascinating the comments that he makes, I believe in the first chapter, about young men having employment.

He says, "Though I may not exactly make converts of you young ladies, I am sure your father, Miss Morland, would agree with me in thinking it expedient to give every young man some employment. The money is nothing. It is not an object, but employment is the thing, which says volumes about his class and his outlook on the world," that, you know, young men just, they need to have something to keep them busy, essentially.

It's not actually about work, and it's not about earning something from that. It's, it's a moral issue for him. So I would not want to hear his opinions on the disabled and unemployed.

Lauren: No, not at all. And it's also proving to Catherine like, oh, no, no, no. My sons work because I told them that they should have something to do.

Don't get it twisted. My sons don't work because they need the money. They work so that they're not idle, so that they're not just lazing about the house with nothing to do. It's so that they can build character and fortitude and not so they can build wealth, because wealth we have.

Emily: But even so, even without the wealth, he makes sure that she knows that, you know, even if Henry hadn't come from such a well off family, that his living would be [00:14:00] perfectly adequate to, to keep him in, in a good lifestyle.

Lauren: Between that and the breakfast set comments, like, he's really being very obvious.

Emily: He's jumping up and down in front of her and waving his arms and saying,

Lauren: Marry my son!

Emily: Yes.

Lauren: I think he's going to ask you, just say yes.

Emily: The man does not have subtlety.

Lauren: No. But, you know, Catherine doesn't pick up on nuance, so.

Emily: Never once. Except the one time she did and Isabella told her off for it.

Lauren: Right, exactly. Yeah, but the real drama of the section comes when she's having a conversation with Miss Tilney and she's talking about, talking about her mother, because they're talking about her room, and Catherine says, you know, I, "it remains as it was, I suppose," and Eleanor confirms and says, Oh, well, yes.

And Catherine asks, "How long ago may it be that your mother died?" To which Eleanor responds, "She's been dead these nine years." And Catherine is, you know, very deeply feeling about this and can't imagine what it's like to lose your mother. And how much Eleanor must have suffered. And so she asked, well, "were you with her," you know, "to the last?" And Eleanor says no.

And that's when we find out that she was away from home when her mother died and that it was a sudden and short illness. And before I arrived, it was all over and Catherine's blood ran cold. So she, she's sympathizing with her friend, but instead of sympathizing to the fact of like, 'Oh my gosh, it must've been so awful to come home and your mother be gone.'

She immediately starts spinning a story about what this must mean. And the different nefarious things that must be at work behind what Eleanor is saying. Like, well, Eleanor can't know. She must have no idea, but this is what was really was afoot.

Emily: And she almost, almost has a moment of self awareness about this , soon after the moment where her blood runs cold. And it says that "she sometimes started at the boldness of her own surmises, and sometimes hoped or feared that she had gone too far, but they were supported by such appearances as made their dismissal [00:16:00] impossible." What? Are they? Are they really? Because you have taken a series of completely innocuous facts.

And strung them together into this woman that's trapped in the attic and has been for the last nine years, hidden from her children and abused by her cruel husband.

Lauren: Like, this is not Jane Eyre. This, what, what are we doing?

Emily: It also, her general attitude towards General Tilney feels almost like the, the modern internet tendency toward just like catastrophizing things that they don't like.

It's like, 'there must be a solid reason that I don't like this thing.' It can never just be like, 'oh, the vibe is off,' or, 'it's not for me.' There has to be something nefarious and intentional behind it. Like, 'Oh, I don't get along with this person. They must be bad.'

Lauren: Right.

Emily: Sometimes a person is just not for you. Sometimes you just don't mesh.

Lauren: Or writing off a person entirely and saying like, 'Oh, well, no, I can't support so and so because we don't agree a 100 percent on like, this very trifling thing.' Or they've said one thing that was blown out of context, but you never went to go find the context and you just saw somebody quoting what this person allegedly said on Twitter, and you've now decided you no longer like this celebrity who you've never met ever in your life before.

Nuance is dead. Context is dead.

Emily: Nuance is dead, and we have killed it.

Lauren: It's horrific.

Emily: Internet, grow up. Learn critical thinking.

Lauren: I beg of thee.

Emily: And media literacy.

Lauren: Heavy on the media literacy. My god.

Emily: Heavy on the media literacy. But yeah, across these two pages. I wrote, like, as big as I could fit in the margins, as Catherine is, you know, winding out this horrendous tale.

I just wrote, girl, what?

Because it's just so absurd, and she dives so quickly into the worst possible cases.

Lauren: My margin note was just "really?!" Underlined, and [00:18:00] then "seriously?"

Emily: Yeah.

Lauren: And I don't, it's not even the margin note I wrote this time around, it's from the first time I read Northanger Abbey.

Emily: Because honestly, yeah, Catherine, also get media literacy, but in the sense that she's still insisting on applying her little gothic tropes to real life when-- I mean, you know, real life filtered through several meta layers because it's a fiction work, but whatever. Anyway, she's doing what a lot of people also do when they, you know, will call real people's actions queerbaiting. It's like, that's not what that is.

Lauren: That's for fiction, not actual people.

Emily: Yes. We cannot treat real people as if they are being written by some greater force, which, come to think of it, that was a very controversial sentence to say, but.

Lauren: Hmm.

Emily: Anyway.

Lauren: Only if you read into it too far.

Emily: Only if you read into it too far. Anyway there's--

Lauren: Is God queerbaiting us?

Emily: Anyway, where were we?

Lauren: Catherine Catastrophizing.

Emily: Thank you.

Lauren: Oh, alliteration, love it.

Emily: Mm hmm. But the rest of the section mostly consists in her trying to figure out how she's going to get down to the room because she wants to find evidence, I guess, of General Tilney's wrongdoing. She's just so invested in her little gothic narrative and has absolutely no thought about the potential consequences for the real people that she's around.

Which comes shockingly to life when Henry startles her as she's leaving the room, which she has snuck into by herself, and he comes out of a stairwell that she didn't know was there, because he was home early and taking a shortcut from the stables up to his own apartments, [00:20:00] and, wow, yikes, that was... the secondhand embarrassment was real.

Lauren: It was scathing. And that also, the fact that he's taking a shortcut past his mother's room proved that it's not as deserted as Catherine once thought, because if this is a shortcut that Henry takes quite often, then clearly it's not a place that everyone in the house must avoid. It's just a place that General Tilney doesn't want to go because it's probably a little bit painful.

But that realization can't really take root because Henry's asking her what she's doing. She explains that She's exploring and she wanted to, to come and see the room and she's there on her own. And Henry immediately picks up on the fact that something's a little bit off because she's there by herself.

And he says, "it has been your own doing entirely?" To which she does not respond. And then it says, "after a short silence, during which he had closely observed her--" the secondhand embarrassment is already beginning to creep up my spine. "He added, 'As there is nothing in the room itself to raise curiosity, this must have proceeded from a sentiment of respect from a mother's character, as described by Eleanor, which does honor to her memory. The world, I believe, never saw a better woman, but it is not often that virtue can boast an interest such as this.'"

Uh oh.

"The domestic, unpretending merits of a person never known do not often create that kind of fervent, venerating tenderness which would prompt a visit like yours. Eleanor, I suppose, had talked of her a great deal."

So he's trying to very politely say, 'I really love that you want to see where my mother's rooms were, but you did not know her. Why are you here without my sister? This is really weird.'

Emily: But Catherine does not know how to take an out. Never once in her life.

Lauren: Digging that hole.

Emily: Digging that hole.

Lauren: No, she just says in response to 'Eleanor, I suppose, has talked of her a great deal.'

She says, "yes, a great deal. That is, no, not much. But what she did say was very interesting. Her dying so suddenly," and then the parenthetical is, "slowly, and with hesitation, it was spoken. 'And you... none of you being at [00:22:00] home... and your father, I thought, perhaps had not been very fond of her." That is what?

Emily: Mm-Hmm.

Lauren: Honey.

Emily: And Henry being quick picks up on this.

Lauren: Mm-Hmm. He has also read the gothic novels.

Emily: Yes. And he knows how invested she is in them. And he very quickly figures out-- he's-- the rest of the scene read to me as being very brusque. and a little irritated. Just being like, yep, this is where my mother died. Lovely rooms, aren't they? My brother and I were actually at home when it happened. Eleanor couldn't make it.

Lauren: And Catherine continues to dig a hole and says, "but your father, was he afflicted?" Once again, does not take the out. Because he's very irritated. It's like, 'oh yeah, the seizure that killed my mother. I was here for that. Eleanor couldn't make it. And it was awful.' She goes, 'oh, but what about your dad?' No, no, no, no. That was your, that was your signal to end the conversation. And take the out, because he's clearly not happy. Don't continue digging about the father, but she does not take it.

Emily: She's trying to do her little Nancy Drew thing here.

And this is not the audience for it. Because they're talking about the traumatic death of his mother. That he witnessed. I, I could strangle her.

Lauren: Not her finest moment.

Emily: Not her finest moment. No.

Lauren: And Henry, finally, he's been really trying to control himself this whole time. And finally, he just goes, "If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I hardly have words to-- Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English. That we are Christians, consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?

Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is in such a [00:24:00] footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies and where rows of newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

Emily: "They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame, she ran off to her own room."

Lauren: Yikes.

Emily: Yikes. Big yikes.

Lauren: Not, not great. Not good.

Emily: Yeah. I would, in that situation, just be like, okay, bye. I will never speak to you or anyone related to you ever again.

Lauren: I'm gone. In tears of shame, running off to my room would be pretty much my only response to that situation.

I don't know how else I'd be able to really exit from that conversation.

Emily: I mean, there's no defense because she has clearly just been making another horrid novel out of real events. And that's indefensible.

Lauren: Not her finest hour.

Emily: Definitely not.

Lauren: So we ended on a little bit of an awkward tension for the end of this section.

Emily: Awkward tension? I would even have called that a falling out.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, beginning of chapter 22, General Tilney strongly hinting to Catherine that she's probably going to marry into the family.

And at chapter 24, Henry is ticked at her because she's just insinuated that his father has been keeping her mother locked up, or worse, for the last nine years. And... Did not understand that her death was really traumatic for everybody in the family. So what a journey. And that's what you missed on Glee.

Emily: Yeah. The first thing that popped into my head was just Knightley's line from Emma, that it was badly done.

Lauren: It was badly done, Catherine.

Emily: Jane Austen really knows how to wrench us with her heroines' bad behavior. It's so painful to read, it's so painful to know that it's perfectly in line with that character, and they're gonna have to do some serious [00:26:00] growing up to get past that.

Lauren: They need to do some soul searching. So it'll be interesting to see what type of... Amends Catherine makes in the next section and what kind of internal reflection she's going to need to do to move past incidences like these.

Emily: She's going to have to do it fast. Cause we only got seven chapters left.

Lauren: It's that chop, chop.

Emily: Get moving, girly.

Lauren: Let's, let's get that frontal lobe developing. Let's, let's get it going.

Emily: I mean, once again, you've realized that she's 17.

Lauren: She's a kid.

Emily: She is.

Lauren: I mean, you still shouldn't do that, but she's a kid. And those are the, the events of this chapter. Where did you see our theme of hard work?

Emily: Oh, well, I brought up at least one with General Tilney's opinion on hard work completely disregarding all the people who work in his house. But even right at the opening of the chapter where Catherine awakes to the housemaid throwing open her curtains or shutters or whatever, and the fire already being stoked.

It's like, well, someone here is working hard and it's not Catherine.

Lauren: Yeah. And that was the exact thing I had too, was the usual invisible hard work of the people who are keeping Northanger Abbey going. And there's a really great quote. I think that's in chapter 22 where Catherine is really getting a sense of just how much work it takes to run Northanger Abbey, but also how many people it takes to run Northanger Abbey.

And so she says, "how inexpressibly different in these domestic arrangements from such as she had read about from Abbeys and castles, and which, though certainly larger than Northanger, all the dirty work of the house was to be done by two pair of female hands at the utmost. How they could get through it all had often amazed Mrs. Allen, and when Catherine saw what was necessary here, she began to be amazed herself."

Emily: I noted that line, too. It was just so perfect.

Lauren: It's like, 'in the books I read, it's only like, Two servants who just do everything around the house,' but she's realizing, no, there's, there's no way, [00:28:00] like not just the, the curtains being open and the fire being lit and the housemaid coming to make sure that Catherine is okay and can get dressed for the day.

But somebody has to do that for everyone in the house. Somebody has to be cooking the food that you eat for breakfast. Someone has to be cleaning the home. Somebody has to be tending that garden. Somebody has to be making sure a hundred pineapples can be grown.

Emily: Like there's a freaking a hundred pineapples.

In England! Yeah. And at another point, she notes there being a whole village, a whole parish basically keeping the house running.

Lauren: It takes a lot of work to maintain and to run those massive manors, and it's not always something that's acknowledged, either, in literature or by the people who live in those homes.

So I like that we got a little bit of a glimpse into Northanger Abbey doesn't just run itself. There's actually a lot of people whose literal life's work it is to make the family of this home more comfortable.

Emily: Yeah, that was a big undercurrent of hard work in this chapter.

Lauren: That is more hard work than anybody else in this chapter does.

Emily: Seriously. Oh, but General Tilney has the affairs of the nation to worry about.

Lauren: Ah, okay. Affairs of the nation. What are you doing, sir? Huh. Where are you sailing to?

Emily: I'd like some answers on this, please.

Lauren: I would like to know what part of the empire the Queen is sending you to, or the King, rather, at this point in time.

Where are you going? What's happening? What's up, bud? What's going on? Where you headed? Who are you colonizing this time? I don't empathize with you, General Tilney.

Emily: Not at all. Even if he didn't murder or imprison his wife, I don't sympathize with him.

Lauren: I will sympathize with you for losing someone you cared about, but not for any of the alleged hard work you may have been doing.

Emily: No.

Lauren: Other than the not so invisible labor of the folks of the house and the, okay, fine, a little bit of work that General Tilney did to create a vision that other people executed. [00:30:00] Did we see hard work anywhere else?

Emily: I mean, Catherine's certainly working hard to make up these stories.

Lauren: That's very true. I was gonna say that, but I felt like I reached my sarcasm quota for the day.

Emily: It's okay, I can pick it up now. Yeah, but aside from that I think those were the places that I saw hard work.

Lauren: Yeah, I don't know that we can classify anything Henry's doing as hard work.

Emily: Yeah.

Lauren: I'm really, now I just want to know, what was Henry's little side mission? Like, did he just go and, like, write his sermon in the carriage, deliver his sermon, and then come back?

Yeah. Like, what, what were you doing?

Emily: Maybe it's a Frank Churchill where he went to get his hair cut and he's actually doing something else.

Lauren: Was he at a jeweler's? All right. If that's what we have for hard work, I would love to know what your historical topic is today.

Emily: Well, because it was so prescient for this section, it's actually something we brought up earlier and it's the small army of servants that have to serve Northanger.

Lauren: Oh, goody.

Emily: Yeah. So this is... Like domestic servitude is something that I talked about back in Mansfield Park a little bit, but that was in the context of the supposedly poor Prices having two maids. This is a completely different ballgame. Northanger Abbey is clearly a large house, so in houses large enough you don't just have, you know, those, those four female hands doing all the work.

There's a divide between upper and lower servants. There's, you know, middle management. It's a whole ecosystem of other people who are keeping the house running for these three or four family members who are in attendance. So the head of this service structure is generally the butler and housekeeper, overseeing the male and female servants, respectively.

There would also usually be a steward who handles the head of household's business, but he's kind of... out of that [00:32:00] particular service structure because he's doing business things and not like household maintenance. But Butler and Housekeeper are the top of the upper servants who are the people who report directly to the family, like ladies' maids and valets plus cooks or chefs.

Then the lower servants are the ones who take care of the sort of daily household maintenance tasks and basic service. So Catherine, even though she's, you know, shocked by the sheer volume of people here, probably has a few servants at home because the Morlands are definitely at least middle class. But Northanger clearly has like a full staff to the point that these offices in the revamped wing are completely chock full of people doing the work of the estate.

These servants were usually lower class. So you might remember in Emma, when we were discussing the role of the governess, that usually middle class woman was kind of awkwardly placed between the upper class of the family and the lower class of the servants and not belonging to either fully.

The Tilneys apparently employ quite a few different ranks of servant. Which could include a lot of different groups. So, as I mentioned, there's the butler, housekeeper, cook, who are kind of the senior management of the household. They supervise other servants and report directly to the head of household. Ladies' maids and valets are the ones who are waiting directly on the family.

Helping them dress, running their little errands, things like that. Footmen are kind of the background servant who, like, attends the family, so, you know, helping them into carriages. They're also, I saw it described somewhere as them being kind of like the bouncers of the bodyguards. Housemaids, like the one who stoked Catherine's fire and opened her shutters are keeping the house in working order throughout the day.

Kitchen maids assisting with food preparation. [00:34:00] Specialty maids, like dairy maids or nurse maids, might also be around depending on the particular needs of the estate. Scullery maids are like the lowest of the low. They're just cleaning up in the kitchen and it's hard and dirty work. And then there are outdoor staff, like anyone tending the stables, or the grounds, or those ridiculous hothouses growing the pineapples.

But even good employment, which one would hope Northanger is, could be very confining. So there's a writing from William Taylor, who was a footman in the 1830s, who said, "The life of a gentleman's servant is something like that of a bird shut up in a cage. The bird is well housed and well fed but is deprived of liberty, and liberty is the dearest and sweetest object of all Englishmen. Therefore, I would rather be like a sparrow or a lark, have less housing and feeding, and rather more liberty."

Because even in these good houses, service wages were some of the lowest in the English workforce, and often were not paid regularly. Employers would... intentionally keep wages back. Sometimes nominally in case servants like took anything or like they had to pay for something out of their wages.

Servants had little to no privacy or social life and often not much bodily autonomy either. Many were treated as being untrustworthy inherently by their employers who would just assume that they were constantly stealing or eavesdropping. They didn't have much, if any, control over their lives, including who they married or whether they could have families.

So yeah, even, even in cases where they're treated well, quote unquote, by their employers, it's. It's a pretty rough life.

Lauren: Yeah, I feel like the easy, I guess, pop culture connection to help people envision that is like a show like Downton Abbey more recently. If you want to go back farther than that, like a movie like Gosford Park, where you can see like the upstairs downstairs vibe of here's what's happening [00:36:00] in the family. And then here's the, the short end of the stick that the people actually helping this family run.

Emily: The little duck legs swimming under the surface.

Lauren: Yeah. It's like, it's the duck syndrome where everything is calm on the surface and everything looks great. And then if you dip just below the surface of the water, they're kicking wildly to make everything work.

Yeah, thank you.

Emily: Yeah, it was perfect that we had already brought that up in discussion. It was like, yes! Full circle! For all of us! Yes. Well, what do you have for our pop culture connection? I hope it's a little bit lighter than the servants situation.

Lauren: It is!

Emily: Good!

Lauren: So the first episode we did in Northanger Abbey, I said there was a pop culture connection that I wanted to make and I was going to save it for later.

So our first episode, I talked about internet speak instead. And what I was saving, which was the perfect opportunity to bring back up today was the concept of main character syndrome.

Emily: Oh my goodness.

Lauren: Because Catherine has it in spades and I'm very glad I saved it for this section because I feel like it is just so evident in all of her actions that she is undertaking over the course of these three chapters.

So. Main character syndrome is exactly what it sounds like. It's pretty self explanatory, but for an easy explanation of main character syndrome, there's actually a cool article about it in Psychology Today. There are lots of different articles about main character syndrome, which is interesting to me because It really just exists as a social media term or social media phenomenon.

This is not an actual, like, DSM 5 syndrome.

Emily: Can you imagine?

Lauren: People have just made this up, but it is a, it is a good way to kind of classify and discuss certain behaviors. And so this article says, you know, "every few months there appears a new syndrome or problem allegedly arising from social media usage.

This may either say something about the dangers of the technology or fears of the new or both, and the latest of these to emerge is called Main Character Syndrome. Currently, Main Character Syndrome is a vague term, which has more media and social media usage than [00:38:00] scientific, but the term refers to a wide range of behaviors and thoughts.

At root, it is when somebody presents or imagines themselves as the lead in a sort of fictional version of their lives, usually their own, although sometimes disturbingly someone else's, and presents that life through social media." So in modern terms, a lot of it has to do with how people are talking about or displaying themselves on social media, but you can really distill that to like, they picture themselves as the main character in this grand story that's playing out around them to the point where they only view the other people on their lives as side characters or to use like video game terminology, like NPCs, a non playable character.

They're just the people around you to create color in the story or to fill it out. They're the side characters that the author has written to make the world feel a little bit more real, but they don't actually have hopes and dreams of desires of their own. They're all here in service to the story that I'm telling about my life.

And Catherine is 100 percent imagining herself as a protagonist of a Gothic novel from the moment she arrives in Northanger Abbey, a little bit before that as well, but it really ramps up the second she enters an actual Gothic novel setting. And really, you know, she, although she has been imagining herself as the lead character of her life for the majority of the book up until now, it's been mostly harmless and in her head.

So she's been fantasizing and creating these stories, but it hasn't really become an issue because she has not really been externalizing that in a way that could be harmful to other people. She's creating stories in her head, but she's still allowing other people agency in their own lives. She's not so much assigning behavior to them as she is by the time she gets to Northanger Abbey.

And in these three chapters, we see it start to have negative consequences with Henry's incredulous disapproval. And then Catherine ending the section, like running in tears back to her bedroom. Because she just insinuated to her crush that his father is a terrible person who's [00:40:00] been locking up his mother.

And she misses all the clues that he, General Tilney, is just grieving in his own way in order to make the people around her fit into the story that she's telling herself about their environment. And sometimes main character syndrome is aligned with narcissism or something like that. And I don't think that's the case with Catherine.

I think sometimes they can just be like, a form of maladaptive daydreaming, which is more what she's doing. Like Catherine's not being a narcissist where she doesn't think that the people around her matter at all. It's more that she's so caught up in her daydream and being the main character of the story that she's telling herself that she's not picking up on any of the clues that might take away from the story that she's telling.

If it doesn't fit with the story, she's already created in her head. She's not really internalizing that detail because she's decided what the story is already and this evidence does not fit with that. So she has a major case of main character syndrome in these 3 chapters and we see just how detrimental it is in Henry's reaction when main character syndrome is suddenly externalized into real world and she gets real world, non fictional consequences.

Emily: That is such a perfect concept to apply to Catherine because very explicitly throughout the text she's comparing her own life, right from the beginning to gothic novels.

And clearly just wants to be The heroine of one unfortunately, that's not how real life works.

Lauren: Yeah, it does not work that way and she gets a very rude awakening that she may be the main character of her own life, but she's not the main character of the story that she's telling in her head.

Emily: Definitely.

Lauren: Real life doesn't work that way.

Emily: Real life is not just stories.

Lauren: No. So that's my pop culture connection for today is main character syndrome. And you may also find people to [00:42:00] apply it to in your own life when you see them acting like they are social media influencers for their 100 followers on Instagram.

The end.

Emily: Very nice. Thank you so much.

Lauren: You're welcome.

Emily: Well, I guess that brings us to final takeaways.

Lauren: It does. I recapped first.

Emily: This is not going to be thematic, but just to go back to that whole conversation we had earlier, about real people not being characters, and real life not being, you know, scripted to fit a particular genre.

It's just, it is what it is, and you can't try and piece a story together to fit your own desires out of random trivia. Catherine.

Lauren: Reality can't be bent to your will, unfortunately.

Emily: Exactly. What's your final takeaway?

Lauren: I keep coming back to the invisible labor of all the people in the house. And so I think that my final takeaway is that there are a lot more people involved in creating a fairy tale story than easily visible or easily perceived if you're not looking for it.

Emily: Definitely.

Lauren: There might be a fairy tale or something that seems like a fairy tale when you get to go and experience it. But there is somebody who's working really, really hard to create the fairy tale for you and their work deserves to be recognized too.

Emily: Well, I believe that brings us to our tarot now. I think that I get to pull this time.

Lauren: I believe that's correct.

Emily: All right, our next card is the Seven of Hearts, which has some very lovely teacups. I wonder if it has anything to do with General Tilney's breakfast set.

Lauren: It does not officially, but in my head it does.

Emily: Okay, now it does.

Lauren: The Seven of Hearts is Choice. And it says there are many teacups to choose from, but you cannot daydream forever and avoid making a decision.

Emily: This feels like it's going to [00:44:00] be extremely relevant,

Lauren: 100 percent.

Emily: Absurdly relevant.

Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading Chapters 25 through 27 of Northanger Abbey through the lens of choice.

Emily: To read our show notes and transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com. You can also find the full back catalog and links to our social media.

Lauren: If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon at Reclaiming Jane Pod.

Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and Co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis Hale. Our music is by Latasha Bundy, and our show Art is by Emily Davis Hale.

Lauren: We'll see you next time.

Emily: Also going back to Catherine's disappointment about everything new in the house and that wing being replaced. I loved the comment about everything in all of the apartments being so elegant and being furnished within the last five years. They were perfect in all that would be generally pleasing and wanting and all that could give pleasure to Catherine, which.

Yeah. I completely relate to houses that are totally like newly furnished. I'm like, but where's the personality? Come on.

Lauren: It's the before and after of these old houses with like actual beautiful architecture, [00:46:00] and then the after of, this is just another really boring, gray, flat revamp, and you took away everything that was unique and wonderful about this home.

Emily: Always the gray and just like the flat wood cabinets and the gray laminate flooring. I have really strong opinions about this. It's awful.

Lauren: Well, I don't even have strong opinions about interior design. I have strong opinions about that specific type of modern interior design because it's just so devoid of personality and you, it's awful.

I won't go into a tangent about that, but it's, it's bad. So I sympathize with Catherine on that front. Absolutely.

Emily: On this point, she is correct.

Lauren: Correct.

Emily: On most of the other points she makes in this section, not so much.

Lauren: Way off.