Dossier by Cecilia Lasa

SOLEDAD CABALLERO FLORENCIA CARRIÓ MARÍA EUGENIA UMARAN

CECILIA LASA (COMP.)

Lasa, Cecilia (comp.). A Walk into Northanger Abbey. A Dossier. Buenos Aires: Trenzas de Escritura, 2016.

Esta obra estรก bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribuciรณn-NoComercialCompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional.

Ilustraciรณn: Florencia Carriรณ

Contents

Prologue…………………………………………………………………………

Cecilia Lasa Pretence as a Means of Social Ascension on Northanger Abbey……………..

Soledad Caballero Manufacturing Human Commodities in Northanger Abbey…………………

Florencia Carrió Promotion and Demotion in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey……………… 22 María Eugenia Umaran

Prologue

Writing is, always, a reading experience articulated upon a desire which seeks further reading. It is language craving for more language and it is a particular form of human bond based upon shared knowledge. This dossier is no exception and I have the honour and the pleasure to be the first reader of the thought-provoking essays written by Soledad Caballero, Florencia Carrió and María Eugenia Umaran. Soledad, Florencia and María Eugenia meet here due to a number of features in common. To begin with, they are advanced students of the Profesorado en Inglés at ISP “Dr. Joaquín V. González”. A second point of contact is that the year 2015 finds them attending the subject Literature II, which I teach. Besides, as future teachers of English studying, among other topics, Literature written in English from the Renaissance period up until the Victorian era, they share a curious and inquisitive mind, willing to express doubts, pose questions and provide challenging answers. Finally, they observe in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey the conditions to put their learning to the test. I am, then, the circumstance that gathers those features and channels their insights into the novel for other students of the subject. Having read their contributions, I am in a position to claim that their writing performance has finally reached a satisfactory end by means of this humble publication. Such an assertion, though, is nothing but a fallacy. The three writers know that they have actually started an endless path: by writing they are inviting their readers to keep on writing. They are responsible for this desire set in motion. In this regard, a final element that binds Soledad, Florencia and María Eugenia is that of the creature in the novel analysed before Austen’s, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Chapter 24 reads: “Sometimes, indeed, he left marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone”. Like the creature, these three writers have left their marks on the margins of their books. Today, those notes are marking a different pace of writing for others, as Shelley’s novel states, to be guided or infuriated… Yes, infuriated, since Soledad, Florencia and María Eugenia share the certainty that ideas become ideas when they can be argued. This is the mark they are responsibly leaving, for others to read and write.

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, July 2016 Cecilia Lasa

Pretence as a Means of Social Ascension on Northanger Abbey

Soledad Caballero

he 18th century was a period marked by two significant events, which changed not only the political organization of Europe, but also its economic system. The First Industrial Revolution between 1760 and

1850 and the French Revolution in 1789 enhanced the rise of the middle-class as a powerful social class. People in this position were supposed to be knowledgeable and literate, as opposed to the working class. Due to their social novelty, this social group struggled to consolidate their position and, at the same time, made use of different schemes to climb up the social ladder, sometimes by making use of pretence and falsehood. This social tension was echoed by Jane Austen, who “routinely divides the gentry into two groups, the landed elite and the urban mercantilist, which enact the conflict between old and new money, old and new forms of power, old and new values” (Zlotnick, 2009: 151). A case in point of these contending forces is her novel Northanger Abbey, where the author displays how her mercantilist middle-class characters highlight the possession of some knowledge or commodity, which in most cases they actually lack or it is just a cover-up, only to reassure their social position. Throughout the story, they will draw other characters’ attention on their knowledge on fashion, social news, in other words gossip, and literature, which is in fact only fiction. Fashion knowledge and the possession of trendy items of clothing were believed to have a direct relation to the social class people belonged to and for that reason, their ownership was highlighted. Belonging to a social class which needed to confirm their value in society, most members of it showed off their acquisitions to achieve it. According to the novel, some women considered clothes a token of their social position, especially the protagonist’s chaperone, Mrs. Allen: “Mrs. Allen had no similar triumphs to press on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that the lace on Mrs. Thorpe's pelisse was not half so handsome as that on her own” (Austen, 2007: 18). To Mrs Allen, the importance of clothing was such that the girl she was in charge of, Catherine Morland, who lived in the country and recognized herself ignorant in the matter, had to acquire knowledge or at least pretend to, to be considered part of Bath’s society. It was not until Catherine had 10

acquired this learning on how to fit through fashion that she was allowed to be officially presented. “Dress was her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our heroine’s entree into life could not take place till after three or four days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperon was provided with a dress of the newest fashion” (9). Mrs. Allen tried to introduce Catherine into the world where Isabella Thorpe, a middle-class girl from London, was already a natural inhabitant. She was “a fine handsome girl, thinking of nothing but finery and flirting, and an exact representation of that large class of young women, in the form they assume among the gayer part of the middling ranks of society” (Anonymous, 1998: 313). Isabella, then, gathered all the features of the consolidating middle-class and is presented as a role model to Catherine, who was just becoming acquainted with the demands of society. Apart from fashion, gossip or real life fiction were tools used by middle-class members to manipulate facts and thus to facilitate their admittance into some social spheres they did not belong to. In Northanger Abbey, the Thorpes represented the middle-class gentry who would do and say whatever in their means to promote their own social climbing: John and Isabella Thorpe made use of lies repeatedly to profit from them and to sell themselves into the capitalist social market they lived in: “Both John and Isabella Thorpe tell lies to ‘increase their importance’” (Todd, 2006: 43). In the case of Isabella, she tried to come across as an experienced and modern middle-class girl while she was in fact trying to boost her own image. “So Isabella tries to exert agency over herself as a commodity in the marketplace through the narrative she tells about herself, or what we might anachronistically call false advertising” (Zlotnick, 2009: 284). Living in the beginning of a capitalist society, Isabella showed an understanding of the world she lived in and, thus, made use of exaggerations and falseness to present herself as a person she was not. “Ever attuned to the demands of the marketplace, Isabella understands that in the absence of personal wealth, she needs to advertise herself as an open and affectionate young woman like Catherine rather than as a desperate fortune hunter […]. To drive up her value, Isabella presents herself as a sentimental heroine: in fact, she tries to sell herself as the possessor of the very qualities the Tilney’s attribute to Catherine. She deploys an overheated rhetoric, which endlessly stresses her strong affections and guileless nature to conceal the economic rationalism behind it.” (284). As regards to John Thorpe, he used falsehood as a means to impress people socially superior to him, like General Tilney. John’s lies “more easily affect the social context. In the space of the book, he rattles through London, Oxford, and Bath, as 11

a result imposing his fictions twice on General Tilney, making Catherine first a great heiress, then a pauper” (Todd, 2006: 43). In their struggle for social promotion, the Thorpes made language a commodity. Last but not least, novel reading played an important role in Northanger Abbey as a teaching tool on what to do and believe in order to be part of the elite, in spite of its sometimes fantastic nature. Isabella used novel reading as a commodity similar to dresses. Being a novel reader could position her in a better place in the marriage market. “Isabella is immediate bosom friends with Catherine – in the manner of the intuitive heroines of sentimental novels – although she is in fact no great reader and uses books only as tools of flirtation” (Todd, 2006: 42). Novel reading, however, might have an alternative value as shown by Catherine, who was provided with some knowledge of the world, which was supposed to instruct her on how to act and what to expect from it: “Before she had had the opportunity to see behind Isabella Thorpe's facade, however, Isabella was able to contribute importantly to Catherine's education by introducing her to the delights of fashionable fiction. True, Catherine had read some standard eighteenth-century novels previously, and Isabella's favorites had negligible value as criticisms of life” (Mathison, 1957: 146). These novels introduced the protagonist into worlds she had never heard or thought of. However, what she learnt did not represent real life. “From the Gothic novels, Catherine had come to believe in the possibilities of cruelty, violence, and crime that her sheltered life had shown her no signs of. The forms of cruelty and violence in the Gothic novels were unreal, but cruelty and violence do exist in the well-ordered society of the English midlands” (149). Catherine’s and Isabella’s reading experience evinced they used novels in order to obtain some knowledge but in different ways. “Catherine's reading surely teaches her how to navigate her social world, but it also prompts her to act in ways that suggests an enhanced sense of autonomy… Unlike Isabella Thorpe, whose reading practices lead her to ventriloquize the sentimental heroine” (Zlotnick, 2009: 288). Novel reading, then, was a practice which was also regulated by the market, since, through reading, Catherine became eligible whereas Isabella did not. To conclude, Northanger Abbey could be considered an example of a representation of how middle-class people in the 18th century struggled to authenticate their status and, at the same time, to climb up the social ladder. In that attempt, middleclass gentry made use of lies, pretence and fantasy to obtain what they sought. Clothes were not only the garment people wore to cover their body with, but also commodities, 12

which spoke for the social class they belonged to or tried to belong to. For that reason, middle-class people paid much attention to what they wore as well as what others did. Secondly, some, in order to come across as attractive commodities or to impress others, used gossips and lies just to boost their own image or obtain other people’s favours. Lastly, middle class members used novel reading as a tool to learn how the world worked or as a commodity to enhance their intellectual value. Austen’s novel shows how all this knowledge concerned with either fashion, social gossips or literature became the vital currency of middle-class life.

References Anonymous (1998).

“Review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion” [1818]. In

Littlewood, Ian, Jane Austen. Critical Assessment. Sussex: Helm Information. Austen, J. Northanger Abbey. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2007. Mathison, J. K. “Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen's Conception of the Value of Fiction”. In ELH, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1957), pp. 138-152. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2871826. Accessed: 30-03-2015 Todd, J. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. New York: University Press, 2006. Zlotnick, S. “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in "Northanger Abbey"”. In Studies in the Novel, Vol. 41, No. 3 (fall, 2009), pp. 277-292. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533931. Accessed: 30-03-2015

Manufacturing Human Commodities in Northanger Abbey

Florencia Carrió

ccording to Marx (1859), when the base of a society changes, i.e. when the means of production and the relations of it come into conflict, social changes will inevitable take place. Not only do these social

changes encompass all forms of art, ideology, politics and religion, but they also include the reshaping of human relations, in general, and family relations, in particular. It is in a new form of art, which is also the product of the recently developed economic system, the novel, in which one can perceive the restyling of social life. One of those exponents is Northanger Abbey, a narrative written by Jane Austen in 1818, which illustrates how the conception of human being is manufactured in a modern fashion: they are materialised in commodities; therefore, they have a specific value and can be bought and sold at their convenience retail markets. Human beings start to be alienated from their communal basis to be placed on a shelf on which their purchase depends, and with it, their ultimate happiness in this bourgeois consumerist society. The devaluation of human beings is conceptualised in Northanger Abbey in the remaking of men and women as commodities. Marx explains: The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general (1859). Once the capitalist system has developed, the commodities, which are not only objects but also workers, i.e. human beings, mushroom. These human commodities need to find themselves in the market, which may seem, in the end, their most practical and primary purpose. It is in this light that women in Northanger Abbey self-objectify as well as they objectify men. As the narrator states: “There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no - not even a baronet. [...] not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children” (Austen, 2000: 7). There are no men to buy. The protagonist, Catherine, then needs to find some other markets in which the commodity she needs, a potential husband, is on offer. Anne Crippen Ruderman argues that in Jane Austen’s novels, the election of a husband is introduced as “the most important one a woman faces” as long as it does not “(mean) accepting an inferior man” (1990: 30). The value of the commodities is of utmost 18

importance in this economic emerging system, and this is best illustrated in the case of the main character’s initial friend, Isabella, who tries to buy the most expensive product without having the means to pay for it. Her first choice is Catherine’s brother, to whom she is engaged, but when she realises that there is a finer option, Frederick Tilney, she does not hesitate to flirt with him. She lies when she tells Catherine: “Had I the command of millions, were I mistress of the whole world, your brother would be my only choice” (Austen, 2000: 87). A few pages later, her interest for the wealthier man becomes evident. Tilney’s sister Eleanor knows Isabella’s intentions to marry her brother are absurd, that is why the first question she asks Catherine is: “Are they [Isabella’s family] a wealthy family?” (149). She is aware of the fact that none of Mr. Tilney’s children -herself included- may acquire commodities of less value. Women and men become devalued as such, but they are valued as items in the marriage-market. The way articles are sold not only depends on the market’s demand, but also on their facade. The superficial world of appearances is flourishing in this new era, in which Capitalism and consumerism proliferate. To increase their value in the market, women invest in their images. Shopping, then, becomes their new responsibility: “Every morning brought its regular duties; -shops were to be visited” (13). Through consumption, women can sell themselves at a better price and this new mode of production -Capitalism- continues developing: “The ‘mode of production’ is (...) a ‘total system’ in which the various elements or levels of social life are programmed in some increasingly constricting way” (Tauchert, 2005: 34). From this perspective, consumerism fulfils two tasks: not only does it increase commodities’ market price, but it also feeds the economic system. Fashionable dresses, therefore, are of crucial importance and are the top products to be bought by women. The narrator in Northanger Abbey asserts: “Dress was her fashion” (Austen, 2000: 9). In addition, gowns indicate women’s social position in the marketplace: Mrs. Allen was now quite happy - quite satisfied with Bath. She had found some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself (21). Mrs. Allen’s new friend, Mrs. Thorpe, is evaluated by her fortune and by the manner in which she dresses, not by her personality or intelligence. Later on, the narrator tells the reader about the topics of their conversation -gowns, not surprisingly. Women need to be well-dressed when entering the market, for they will be assessed by men, who seem to have an understanding of clothing. Such knowledge is evidenced 19

when, after Mrs. Allen has asked Mr. Tilney whether he understands muslins, a type of clothing, he states: “Particularly well; I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown” (15). Mr. Tilney has also paid attention to Catherine’s gown, which fortunately has been bought for the special fair. Shopping for partners as much as shopping for clothes become the occupation of the social classes that have time to spare, i.e. the classes that do not need to sell their labour force to survive in this capitalist new world. Northanger Abbey illustrates how the conception of human beings changes, since they start to be seeing as objects to be picked in the market place. Exhibitions are going to take place in balls, for instance, in which commodities can be evaluated. This evaluation is the product of the construction of the capitalist and consumerist woman, whose main interest lies in the manufacturing, through new dresses, of a facade that will increase her value. Men are objectified, too, since women attend the husband-market to pick the best partner they can afford. The base of society has changed after a conflict in the relations of production. This reorganization has brought about social changes, such the objectification of human beings, who become commodities to be chosen, reserved and finally bought -when marriage is consummated- or exchanged, if a better deal appears.

References

Austen, J. (2000) Northanger Abbey. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics Editions. Crippen Ruderman, A. (1990) Love and Marriage in the Novels of Jane Austen. Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Marx, K. (1844-1859) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Retrived October 10, 2015, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. Tauchert, A. (2005). Romancing Jane Austen. Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zlotnick, S. “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in "Northanger Abbey"”. In Studies in the Novel, Vol. 41, No. 3 (fall, 2009), pp. 277-292. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533931. Accessed: 30-03-2015

Promotion and Demotion in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

María Eugenia Umaran

n Europe, the 18th century sees an overall progressive movement away from religious domination and royal abuse, and towards sustained scientific development and individual choice. In his English Literature, Burgess points

out that in the eighteenth century, “the opposite of the ‘classical’ was slowly being prepared, to burst out at the time of the French Revolution” (Burgess, 1974: 141). A prominent attribute of this period is the increasing tension of opposite views regarding the governing order. When analyzing the sociopolitical setting of Northanger Abbey, Janet Todd makes reference to such tension, and she places its development some time “after the French Revolution, which had had such a profound political impact on Britain, and before the Industrial Revolution truly transformed the nation into the first urban industrial power” (2006: 13). These features are of relevance in order to understand a prevailing major change of paradigm, and its implications regarding Austen’s work. The Revolution in France produces a shift towards a fairer distribution of power; and the Industrial Revolution, with steam as the new energy source, brings about a turning-point in commercial practices, which consequently start profiting from enhanced forms of manufacturing and transportation. As these two spheres, the social and the economic, concomitantly evolve, mercantilism further develops and the middle class rises. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written near the turn of the century, is both inscribed in and functional to this social setting of transition. In fact, Jane Austen has been described as a keen observer of the real world, and her work as a faithful depiction of everyday life, filled with events that her readers may have easily related to (Bloom, 2008; Southam in Lambdin, 2000). In this sense, Northanger Abbey illustrates how a middle class young heroine becomes an adult, under the tenets which 18th century conflict has yielded. The story, which resembles a rite of passage (Mathison, 1957), depicts a middleclass young woman named Catherine Morland who leaves her home on a journey to Bath as the guest of some family acquaintances, Mr. and Mrs. Allen. In her journey, she befriends two sets of dissimilar families: the middle-class Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John; and the upper-class Tilney siblings, Henry, Eleanor and the Captain, and their father, the General. At first, Catherine relates to Isabella Thorpe in particular, especially 24

given their shared middle class status and common interests, such as socializing in general lines and eventually finding a suitable partner. Catherine then meets Eleanor Tilney, whose company she also enjoys; and her brother Henry, who she falls in love with. As she engages in social exchanges with the Tilneys, both Thorpes grow jealous and inconvenience Catherine in her relationship with them. In addition, despite Isabella’s engagement to Catherine’s own brother, James, she displays affection for Captain Tilney instead. This results in both a dissolution of the engagement and Catherine’s choice to distance herself from the Thorpes. Her decision will be key in the development of the story, since it stands at the core of a central issue dealt with throughout the novel: the new social system and the way people interact with it, in terms of voluntary choices. Austen’s portrayal and articulation of multiple social conventions and the consumption of literature can be interpreted as an attempt to reproduce a social system of promotion and demotion consistent with the new economic order. With a middle class eager to ascend, this growingly capitalistic arrangement shall condemn certain social practices -and certain reading habits- and esteem others, in accordance with that which helps replicate the fundamental economic interests of the 18th century. In Northanger Abbey, Austen ranks social behaviours according to how much consumption they may trigger; where opting to engage in expenditure is eventually rewarded by the author in terms of high esteem or good fortune. The first characterization of our heroine presents a rather plain Catherine, at the age of ten: she “loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house” (Austen, 2000: 3). Eventually, however, she employs common practices of embellishment: “Catherine grows quite a good–looking girl — she is almost pretty today,” were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds! To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive” (3). In Austen’s words, beauty is acquired, and cherished as a commodity. It is far from what nature brings, on the one hand, because it does not seem to be found by rolling down a green slope, on the other hand, because it seems to involve processes which are independent from what one can bring from the cradle. As Catherine decides to embellish herself and starts to “long for balls” (3), she gradually begins her trip towards a higher class. A key facilitator in this journey is Mrs. Allen:

In one respect she was admirably fitted to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere and seeing everything herself as any young lady could be. Dress was her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our heroine’s entree into life could not take place till after three or four days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperone was provided with a dress of the newest fashion. Catherine too made some purchases herself, and when all these matters were arranged, the important evening came which was to usher her into the Upper Rooms (7).

In this description of what “going public” entails, the novel puts forward outings -going everywhere, going to the Upper Rooms- and being fashionable -learning what was worn, having dresses of the newest fashion- as two central aspects which will determine the quality of interpersonal exchanges. According to Zlotnick, this responds to the impact the economic has on life, which seems to be “a social world dominated by financial transactions” (2009: 278). As long as Catherine keeps making decisions as an avid social consumer, she will be rewarded in her journey to adulthood. Along these lines, the consumption of literature is also brought to constant focus in the novel. Indeed, its three main female characters, Isabella, Catherine and Eleanor, are defined according to their relationship with fiction: Isabella Thorpe, whose sentimental rhetoric (derived from novels) is a mere cover for her rational and self-interested participation in the marketplace, has the greatest faith in commerce's liberating possibilities for women, and Austen responds to her by making her the novel's biggest loser and sending her back to London, alone and unengaged. Eleanor possesses a clear-sighted understanding of woman's status as a commodity in the marriage market, although this insight into women's commodification does not set her free but merely depresses and immobilizes her. So does her reading: her commitment to the "non-fictional" narratives of male historians offers her no models of women as historical actors, and thus Eleanor suffers from not having any saving illusions about her own efficacy. Roughly educated and ignorant of economics, Catherine Morland stands in contrast to Isabella, with her shameless self-promotion, as well as to Eleanor, who seems defeated by the economic realities and historical "truths" she apprehends so well. What sets Catherine apart is her novel reading (Zlotnick: 2009, 279-80).

As these different readers are constructed, the three women go in different directions: Isabella is left with no suitor, Eleanor cannot marry whom she loves since she is strategically promised to a wealthy man, instead, based on familial economic needs; but Catherine, however, eventually marries her beloved. According to Zlotnick, there seems to be a radical effect stemming from the interaction of the economic and the social on these characters’ fates, mediated by the role of novel reading. By the end of Northanger Abbey, Isabella and Eleanor have been demoted -either to being single or unhappily married- because they both stand in opposite extremes: the first is driven by purely 26

capitalistic urges to ascend socially, with complete disregard for what is morally correct; the second, while honest, does not particularly care for self-marketing (Zlotnick, 2009), although she is too much aware of her status as a commodity. In both cases, there has been little to no fiction in their lives to influence them, which differentiates Catherine: “Catherine's reading surely teaches her how to navigate her social world, but it also prompts her to act in ways that suggests an enhanced sense of autonomy. Her reading leads her to unexpected but welcomed exertions and selfassertions” (288). In this context, she is unique, which is also a highly esteemed feature of mercantilism: “a market that increasingly values the ‘uniqueness’ of the individual as well as the individual commodity, Catherine Morland's sui generis naivete is going to be more appealing than Isabella's worldliness” (284). By shaping a heroine that knows herself naïve, or ignorant, especially in terms of economic ignorance (287), but who, at the same time, holds enabling knowledge gained through her consumption of fiction, Austen has constructed Catherine as a woman who is suitable for marrying the man she chooses, and has promoted her to a higher class, due to her proven ability to make moral and social choices within the economic framework determined by the mechanics of the times. The French and Industrial Revolutions have had profound effects in European society. As political power starts to gradually be more evenly distributed, and new technologies cause major shifts in the production and distribution of goods, a new social order rises: the middle class. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen depicts a society transitioning the tension which has been brought about by such major paradigm changes, and focuses on female social practices which are highly esteemed -like acquiring beauty, shopping for dresses, attending balls- and those which are considered uninteresting or immoral -girls rolling down a slope instead of playing with dolls- in order to praise the first and condemn the latter. Additionally, within the novel, different characters are constructed as different readers, who consequently go in different directions, up and down the social ladder: Isabella, whose interest in fiction only responds to what she believes is well-seen, struggles promote herself into a higher status, but is finally demoted by the writer, when she resorts to immoral behavior in order to ascend -showing interest for a man while promised to another-; Eleanor, who only reads non-fictional narratives, has chosen a man she would like to marry, but is later on promised to another, for her family’s economic benefit. Austen explores a tension between the kind of reader these protagonists are and the way they behave 27

socially, proposing that exposure to fictional works is enabling when it comes to personal decisions. Consequently, Catherine, who is an avid consumer of such fiction, is able to make decisions which render her unique, and therefore, apt for marrying up. In telling the story of three different women, Northanger Abbey not only recreates the mechanics of the English 18th-century marketplace, but characterizes different models of consumers of literature within it, with the purpose of demoting the least profitable and praising that which fuels the fictional-writing cycle.

References

Austen, J. (2000) Northanger Abbey. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics Editions. Burgess, A. (1998). English Literature. London: Longman. Todd, J. (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: CUP. Bloom, H. (Ed). (2008). Bloom’s Classical Critical Views: Jane Austen. New York: Infobase Publishing. Cooner Lambdin, L., Lambdin, R. T. (Ed.). (2000). A Companion to Jane Austen’s Studies. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Mathison, J. K. “Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen's Conception of the Value of Fiction”. In ELH, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1957), pp. 138-152. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2871826. Accessed: 30-03-2015 Zlotnick, S. “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in "Northanger Abbey"”. In Studies in the Novel, Vol. 41, No. 3 (fall, 2009), pp. 277-292. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533931. Accessed: 30-03-2015