My Problem with Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

I’ll say it up front: this is my least favourite of Austen’s novels. I re-read it rarely, in comparison to my favourites, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. It doesn’t call out to me in the way that the others do, reminding me that it’s sitting on my shelves, waiting for me to turn my attention once more to its pages.

But, a few days ago, I was flipping channels and happened upon a film version of the book – one I hadn’t even known existed – and I decided to read it again to see if my feelings about it had changed.

They haven’t.

It’s an enjoyable read, to be sure – it’s hard to imagine not finding something to enjoy in an Austen novel – but I remain unable to connect to Catherine Morland the way I do with the women of Austen’s other novels. Part of it, I think, is that Austen has made too much of a satire of Catherine’s character for me to warm to her. Most of Austen’s other protagonists – Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot – have their weaknesses, flaws and follies, but they also have their strengths. They are strong characters with distinguishing qualities. They are individuals. Catherine Moreland has never seemed to me to emerge from the text as a person in her own right the way Austen’s other protagonists do – the circumstances she finds herself in seem to overwhelm her, and she never seems to be much more than a pretty and somewhat silly girl who loves reading Gothic novels.

All the other elements of the Austen novel are present, and indeed the social satire is stronger here than in some of the other novels, and the skewering of the conventions of the Gothic novel are fine indeed, but without a strong and central protagonist, the rest of it falls just a little flat.

Vonarburg's Vision

Elisabeth Vonarburg, translations by Jane Brierley:
The Silent City
The Maerlande Chronicles

I first read Elisabeth Vonarburg’s The Maerlande Chronicles (published in the US as In the Mother's Land) some years ago. It captured my imagination in a way that no other feminist exploration of a female-dominated society has. It remains my favourite example of the subgenre, more so than other, better-known feminist revisionings of society, be they utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in between.

It’s hard for me to put my finger on just why this book is so meaningful to me in the midst of such powerful works as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, to name but a few.

Part of it is the mystery, I think - the fact that Vonarburg lets us look at her future society from the inside out and leaves her vision incomplete and unfinished. Vonarburg’s Maerlande is a commonwealth of matriarchal societies at a pivotal point in their history. We know some of what has gone before, but only through the eyes of the characters - we do not know, nor will we ever learn, the uninterpreted truths. We know that changes are coming, from the discovery of new evidence about the past, from explorations planned for the future, from plans old and new only referred to and never described explicitly, but we do not know what those changes will be or how they will affect Maerlande and its people. There are characters whose functions in this change are only partially seen and understood. Vonarburg gives us an image of a future that is as open to speculation, interpretation, and conjecture as any real society is, and furthermore, one in which not only gender roles but gender itself may be less fixed and certain than we, and the women of Maerlande, believe.

Some time after my first reading of The Maerlande Chronicles, I discovered a library copy of The Silent City, which is set in the same universe as a time some centuries before. While the events of The Silent City – set during a period of worldwide social disintegration out of which the commonwealth of Maerlande will some day evolve – illuminated some of the questions, the uncertainties, the mysteries, there was still much that I didn’t have a clear interpretation of.

For some time, I thought this might be due to the fact that I read them in the “wrong” order, so this fall, after finally acquiring my own copy of The Silent City, I decided to read both volumes in order, only to find that the tantalising lack of definitive determination of objective fact remains.

The Silent City is set at the end of technological Civilisation; a plague has swept around the world, disproportionately killing men, and most of humanity is sinking into various forms of barbarism, most of which are violent and patriarchal. At the same time, the last remnants of "civilised" humanity have withdrawn into underground fortresses, from which they send out, from time to time, cyborg observers to watch the disintegration happening around them. The novel tells the story of one of the last inhabitants of the last functioning city, whose genetic experiments may ultimately bring about an unfathomable change in human existence.

The Maerlande Chronicles takes up the story several centuries later. Humanity is recovering from the devastation of the past, although some variation of the old plague remains a threat to all children and men are still in the minority. A commonwealth of matriarchal societies has come into existence, each one somewhat different in the ways it deals with issues of gender, reproduction and leadership, among other aspects of life, but all drawing much of their culture from a key religious event involving a female saviour figure and her apostles. We see the events of the novel from a number of perspectives, one of which may be informed by at least some, if not all, of the information and experience of the key protagonists of the earlier book, but the crucial mysteries of the past – the reality behind the religion of Maerlande – and the future – what will be the ultimate effect on humanity of the combination of the plague and the genetic modifications that are part of the first novel's plot – remain unanswered.

And there is something both comforting and compelling in that uncertainty, because it is so very real.

Genesis

In The Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis, by Karen Armstrong

In addition to the great sweeping texts exploring aspects of religious thought throughout history and around the world that she has become deservedly known for, Karen Armstrong has also written a number of narrowly focused books on religious issues, such as this slim volume in which she undertakes a close examination of the events of the Biblical book of Genesis.

Perhaps the central tenet of all of Armstrong’s writing about religion is that as she says in the first chapter of this book, "the true meaning of scripture can never be wholly comprised in a literal reading of the text, since that text points beyond itself to a reality which cannot adequately be expressed in words and concepts."

For Armstrong, scripture – any scripture, not just that of the Judeo-Christian tradition – is not a matter of fact but a path to a transcendent experience:

In almost all cultures, scripture has been one of the tools that men and women have used to apprehend a dimension that transcends their normal lives. People have turned to their holy books not to acquire information but to have an experience. They have encountered a reality there that goes beyond their normal existence but endows it with ultimate significance. They have given this transcendence different names – Brahman, Dharma, Nirvana, or God – but, however we choose to describe or interpret it, it has been a fact of human life. We are constantly aware of an ideal level that contrasts with the world around us. We may not regard this realm as supernatural; we may prefer to find it in art, music or poetry rather than in a church. But human beings have persistently sought a dimension of experience that seems close to our normal lives and yet far from them.

The aspect of human experience that is addressed in Genesis, according to Armstrong, is beginnings – the beginnings of the relationship between the divine and the world of material existence, between human beings and the experience of the divine, between human beings in that nexus of personal beginnings, the family, and between human beings and their interior lives – their fears, desires, flaws, needs, shadows.

Armstrong sees the great stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel as a lesson that as human beings, we are constantly choosing how we will engage in all of these relationships, and that we cannot cut ourselves off from relationships without damaging ourselves. The stories of Genesis are stories of separation, rejection, denial, distance and division. In the actions of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, we see occasional examples of how openness to relationships and self-knowledge can bring transcendence, but far more often, we watch as cutting one’s self off from others and seeking only to serve one’s self leads to fear, pain, resentment, and grief.