Author: CharlesDickinson

I first read Northanger Abbey while abroad at Oxford last year in my second term. It was my first (and only) book I was able to and did request, and I was able to read it with my favorite tutor, making the experience intellectually special. Jane Austen does not really resonate with me very strongly otherwise, but a gothic parody seemed tailor-made for my interests of the gothic genre and camp, so I wanted to try. I had greater emotion attached to the novel beyond the intellectual, though. I had been really disappointed with my first term for a number of reasons, the main of which included my first term tutor disparaging my supposedly lacking time management skills. I knew it wasn’t true, but it did hurt- and I did wonder. As such, I resolved to overprepare with contemporaneous Gothic novels to contrast against Northanger in my second term by reading as much as I could. This included works like Vathek and The Old English Baron, but also more pertinent ones like The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho. I loved the Radcliffe not for themselves, but what they represented. They reminded me very much of the YA trash I read as a teenager and what continues on the market, and I really enjoyed thinking about the parallels in tropes and what that says about how far or little we’ve come in depicting women. My prep reinvigorated my intellectual energy and sense of fun, and it actually made me excited for the next term.

The depiction of Catherine Morland defines my love of this novel. I consider her a keystone figure for the depiction of cringe teenage girls everywhere. For ultimately, most people are more like the occasionally-socially unsure and perhaps-obsessive Catherine than witty and proud Elizabeth Bennet. Despite what I had read in various scholarship positioning Catherine Morland as a silly and stupid heroine, I believed her to be treated realistically and without the underlying scornful aggression that sometimes underlie parodies. The text maybe laughs at her antics, sure, but not her as a person, and always allies with her when she expresses deep distress. Though Catherine adores Gothic novels, she doesn’t actually start out with much familiarity of them: rather she wants to be a heroine (Austen 17). She wants to be someone, in the gendered capacities her world will allow. Gothic novels give her an outlet to explore this rather than them being the strict object of obsession. This aspect of life has not gone away: novels like Twilight and the Sarah J Maas books may be bad on an ideological and prose level, but the archetypes they invoke of a powerful heroine, a sexy and dangerous-but-not-too dangerous promise of love are speaking more to a psychological need of security than quality literature. No matter their era, people, especially young people, use books to figure out their life and how they should behave. The cringe young people of today and Catherine are no different.

Northanger Abbey was also what I needed at that point of reading. Through Catherine, the Gothic novel and the chick-lit they represent are gently critiqued, but ultimately affirmed as worthwhile for fulfilling that same psychological need. In the end, Catherine is also ultimately a normal girl who learns to be the person she wants to be unlike the Radcliffe heroines who are born perfect. She makes mistakes and misjudgments, but she learns. To me, that’s really affirming. Most are just “normal’ people, and have to work hard to get somewhere. Her choice in educational fiction also is not necessarily wrong, either: Gothic novels present real problems and anxieties through an uncanny mirror, but that mirror only works if there is something to be afraid of in the first place. Perhaps Catherine doesn’t have ghosts after her, but she does have men in her life who want to make her feel small so they can control her. Though people try to mislead her in various ways, she ultimately has to decide what’s wrong or right based on her own determinations, and instead has to accept her own judgements on the right way to be. As someone who has always cherished feedback and was conflicted about the ones I was currently receiving, Catherine’s resolutions affirmed me emotionally as well as intellectually.

Ultimately, I don’t know how “good” my thesis will turn out. But I will like it. I will like it for myself and all the past, present, and future cringe teen girls Catherine represents.

 

Works Cited:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Penguin Books, 2003.

“’Love is or ain’t.…It ain’t my job to know what’s worse [than Sweet Home]. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that.” (Morrison 195).

Sethe, as an enslaved young woman, already was born to and lives in a nightmare in which she has no power nor protection from threats. Sethe as an enslaved mother leads an even more nightmarish existence: despite the fundamental “jobs” of motherhood is to protect your vulnerable from harm. But how can the powerless protect anything, however much they love and care for their child? And so, when caught by slavecatchers who threaten to take her and her children back to such a nightmare, she does her job- and keeps Beloved away from Sweet Home by killing her (Morrison 191-195). Whether or not this was “right,” as Paul D challenges her, Sethe’s love for her children cannot be denied, and only its expression potentially disputed (Morrison 195). More importantly, through quotes like this and by making Sethe the main character of the novel, we come to understand her and the hellish reality she faced. As a result, the reader may not agree, but we can understand.

For Sethe is not an abstraction: her feelings and choices are drawn from real histories, namely that of Margert Garner (Morrison, xvii). Also with four children, Maragret escaped slavery and was resting at a relative’s house when the slavecatchers came (Carroll, “Margaret”). Like Sethe, she only managed to “slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter,” and intended to kill the others before stopped and arrested for destruction of “property.” (Carroll, “Margaret”). Like Sethe, this violence was likely done out of desperation, for even contemporary newspapers reported at the trial she appeared in “extreme sadness,” and held her youngest even while testifying, not focusing on the baby except “’only once, when it put its hand to her mouth, [they] observed her smile upon it, and playfully bite its little fingers with her lips.’” (Carroll, “Margaret”) Beloved helps recover the emotions of desperation to protect in impossible circumstances- the smile, sadness, and playfulness indicate this was a mother who loved her children. This understanding is important when considering narratives like below:

The above 1867- and thus post-war and post-slavery- “The Modern Medea” image offers none of the humanization started in the newspaper article and transformed totally in Beloved, and implicitly assures the necessity for Beloved as a text.  The lack of humanization to Margaret appears in the title itself- the mythological Medea kills her children in revenge for being cast aside, making the fatal decision one of pride. Sethe and Margaret killed their child to save them from pain, no matter wrongly or rightly, because enslavement is that terrible. The title obscures the motivation for the action itself, creating a false equivalency that subtly withholds sympathy for Margaret in rooting her decisions based on anger rather than systemic desperation and pain. The Margaret of the image conforms to this in glaring at the slavecatchers at the expense of her living and dead children- her remaining children cling to her, but she pays them no mind, unlike the real woman even at her trial. Though we cannot say for sure what Margaret felt in that fateful moment, this depiction does not afford her any dimensions beyond Medea-like fury. She shows (righteous) anger to the men, sure, but what does she feel intrapersonally? This image gives no indication, diminshing Margaret’s likely three-dimensional pain.

Most troublingly of all, the muted depiction of the slavecatchers obstructs of the reasons for Margaret’s anguished act: their invasion, and the slaveholding system they represent. In some way, their horrified expressions and physical recoil in their leg stance credit them with the most “human” reaction to the murder of a child, despite them being the problem. Indeed, one would need context to know these are slavecatchers- they carry no visible weapons, and thus do not appear to pose a threat in the image, not reality. Instead, the pointed hands of both the slavecatchers and Margaret point to the deceased children, emphasizing the horror in the infanticide rather than the cause of the slaveholders. If the portrait had wanted to connect the cause and the result, Margaret’s image might point at the slavecatchers and the children and thus link them. Instead, in emphasizing the horror of the action, “The Modern Medea” hides why this tragedy happened, and the real, impossible pain for a mother trying to save her children from infinite earthly misery. Sethe loves her children, and from what little we can tell of Margaret Garner, she loved her children, too. Images like these prove why Beloved has such power and urgency; whether the action was “right” or not, it was done in great desperation and pain, and whatever opinion on morality, we at least owe it to the “sixty million and more” from Morrison’s dedication to understand (Morrison, xiii).

 

Works Cited:

Primary Sources:

1. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
2. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
3. The Italian by Ann Radcliffe
4.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997-2003

Keywords:

1. Heroine
2. Female Gothic
3. Trope

Journal to Survey:

1. Gothic Studies

Secondary Sources:

1. Contesting the Gothic : Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 by James Watt
2. The History of Gothic Fiction by Markman Ellis
3. “Gothic Success and Gothic Failure” in The Cambridge History of the English Novel by George Haggerty
4. The Making of Jane Austen by Devony Looser
5. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare by Helen Cooper
6. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early Writing by Elizabeth Fowler
7. “Northanger Abbey, Gothic Parody, and the History of the Fictional Female Detective” by Elizabeth Veisz
8. “Catherine Morland’s Gothic Delusions: A Defense of ‘Northanger Abbey’” by Waldo S. Glock
9. “John Thorpe, Villain Ordinaire: The Modern Montoni/Schedoni” by Nancy Yee
10. “Grad School Gothic: The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Academic #MeToo Movement” by Anna Williams
11. The Female Investigator in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture by Lisa M. Dresner
12. Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style by D.A. Miller
13. Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence
14. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel by Alex Woloch

My thesis interest currently lies in analyzing how Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey conforms, resists, and overall comments on the female gothic heroine as popularized by her in-text idol, Ann Radcliffe. So, to understand Catherine, I must understand her literary idols, namely The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Yet, the frameworks based on the Radcliffian heroine often simultaneously empower and misogynistically denigrate women- and not actually too different from modern popular “girl” books like Twilight and those by Sarah J Maas, situating my project in character tropes resonances broader than the 18^th century. I want to explore these tensions, and the implications of what it means to explore those in a Gothic setting, and refract them onto the “realistic” setting of Northanger Abbey.

My research will start to address these varying angles. This will mean reviewing articles with a sharper lens for the literary element central to my interests: characterization. Many of these articles I found or read while abroad last year (and will thus have to get many ILLs), but the 5-page limitation for essays meant I could not really tease out all their implications. I also discovered Gothic Studies last year, and found it helpful to consider the Gothic in broader genre and temporal contexts. Since I want to understand Radcliffe and Austen contextually, I will read Items 1-3 to understand the genre and historical context the works were produced in. Similarly, after talking with Professor Sider Jost, I will also look at Item 5 to examine how Austen’s own literary taste developed. I would also like to further research biographies of Radcliffe to understand how she navigated female authorship.

Items 5-6 were contributions from Professor Skalak as I explained that I wanted to do a Gothic character study, rather than a Jane Austen study, making these medieval-centric books on character tropes applicable to my interests. Radcliffian and other early Gothic characters are just as uncanny as the inhabited settings, making these books a useful lens to consider the sociopolitical purpose of adhering more to tropes than in-depth psychology.

My remaining items are also developed from prior research, and will help me think about the direction I want to discuss Catherine as a Gothic and “Realistic” character. For the uncanny does reflect life, even if in a nightmarish outsized version, which Item 9 relates to even the modern day. In turn, I will use this in concert with the Northanger-centric sources to consider Catherine’s patriarchy struggles and how Gothic novels help and harm this social navigation.

Overall, I want my thesis project to consider what goes into crafting a heroine rather than a “hero.” What makes Emily St. Aubert of Mysteries of Udolpho a heroine, and how does that cohere with other contemporary gothic novels like The Castle of Otranto? How does this understanding of heroinism relate to Catherine’s character development and conceptualization? Ultimately, what does this say about media and identity formation, and how that may help or harm us?

 

Update:

In my updated reading list, I have added the primary text of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and four additional secondary sources on the female investigator, Austen’s style, and characterization. My additional primary source comes from connections made in my previous secondary reading. While the majority of my thesis will still focus on Northanger Abbey, I think Buffy provides an interesting lens to discuss it though. While many of my secondary sources agree that Northanger takes overdramatized villains who nevertheless speak to real anxieties and puts them into an everyday context, many of them just focus on the one villain. In reality, what I think Buffy and Northanger get to, is that it’s the overarching patriarchal world itself that is the gothic danger. Buffy is also a text that meant a lot to me as a teenager, and since my project examines how a teenage girl consumes gothic media to understand the world, I think it’s only appropriate to include it in some capacity. As for my secondary sources, items 2 and 4 were recommendations from Professor Seiler in my conversations with her post the original deadline.  I discovered 1 and 3 on my own at the library. I had heard of 3 before, so I had decided to flip through the index for interesting points about Northanger, which I did find. Item 1 I truly just saw on the shelf, and having read a fascinating article about how Catherine can be read as a proto-female detective, I wanted to read through to see if she was included. Sure enough, she was, and I am excited to further think about her heroine construction from that lens.

Note- this is a plot summary for this nearly century old, largely culturally irrelevant movie for context, not analysis. The analysis will begin after this paragraph:

You may not have heard of Wings, the 1927 silent, first best picture Oscar-winning film, but you have seen it before. Jack, an all-American boy, pines for aviation and dignified city-girl Sylvia. Slyvia’s kindness makes her reticent to break Jack’s heart; she really loves David Armstrong, and equally kind rich boy. When World War I calls and both answer, Jack asks for and receives Sylvia’s picture, unbeknownst to him, that professes love to David on the back. Both boys become friends at training camp, and the friendship soars like their careers as star fighter pilots. The friendship eventually again strains when David destroys the picture to prevent Jack from finding out the truth. In the next battle, David overexerts himself and is shot down trying to prove friendship despite Jack’s anger. David survives, and commandeers a German plane to fly back. Jack sees this German plane and shoots it down to avenge his loss. After landing, Jack realizes the flier was David, and they forgive, caress, and kiss as David dies. Later realizing his foolishness towards Sylvia, Jack returns home a hero, ending the film romantically involved with his neighbor.

So, who is this random neighbor?

She, Mary Preston, played by top-billed megastar Clara Bow, only receives about a tenth of the overall screentime, despite appearing on all the posters. Her scenes are relatively disconnected from the plot; though Sylvia appears for five minutes, her existence causes tension in the main war plot. Mary causes no such tension, and Jack’s first words to her of “Gee, can’t you let a man work in peace?” encapsulate their relationship (Wings, 00:03:26) But though Slyvia affects the war plot more directly, Mary commands her own rom-com subplot to win Jack’s love. When Mary appears on screen, all the other themes of brotherhood(?) and war are forgotten, essentially creating a fusion of a war and rom-com movie, with Mary as the clear lead in the latter. This does not make Wings an “empowering movie,” for a closer look at the genres themselves a deference to prevailing social structures, allowing both to cohere and “come home” in a socially acceptable manner- a heterosexual relationship.

From the opening, Mary’s active pluck sets up a familiar binary with Sylvia. Sylvia literally swings onto the frame with David, sitting, and playing music (Wings, 00:06:48). Mary, after upturning her lacy undergarments on the drying line- creating a more risqué association reinforced by a later scene of her changing topless, even if the character herself is not sexual- to get a better look at Jack, and the climbs a high fence to be next to him (Wings, 00:02:59).

Despite his rebuffs, she puts an apron on to help fix Jack fix his car (Wings, 00:04:09). Though Sylvia has her music, Mary can drive a car, and these driving skills land her in the women’s Motor Corps (Wings, 00:26:20).  Slyvia dresses as an older ideal of women with her elaborate curls and ever-present lacy long dresses, whereas Mary’s flapper bob, risqué associations, and later smart uniform indicate she belongs to a newer era.

Though modern, she has a sensitive heart. When Jack drinks himself to incapacity and dallies with duplicitous women on shore leave, too drunk to realize he must report back- or else, court-martial, Mary must save his career (Wings, 01:07:50)! The scene follows Mary’s point of view, taking long shots of her despair as her attempts at reason don’t work, at one point doused with champagne (Wings, 01:12:59).

But through a random kindly old French woman’s intervention of a glamourous dress, Mary uses her revealed sexiness to save Jack (01:13:50-01:18:00). Unfortunately, after putting him to bed, officers barge into the room while she changes. Assuming her waywardness, Mary tearfully but willingly resigns from the military, and the top-billed character does not return for another hour (01:24:00). Mary expresses her femininity in different ways that Sylvia- sexuality, action, and skills- but she remains a girl in all the ways that matter- obeying authority and standing by “her” man despite his lack.

In Wings, two plotlines exist. The war plot follows the false love triangle of jealousy and brotherhood(?) that culminates in patriotic tragedy, and other involves our zany rom-com top-billed heroine desperately trying to get the protagonist, and thus implicitly the movie, to notice her. For her efforts, despite Jack not remembering her Paris sacrifice, she gets her desired relationship. Mary also joins the chorus of characters at the end assuring Jack that he shares no guilt in David’s death, which includes David and David’s parents- it’s simply the war’s fault (02:06:34-02:17:28). Instead of focusing on the actions of men that comprise the war, responsibility is taken away from Jack so the prevailing social structure and the type of men they produce needs no critiquing. Jack is a hero. End of story. Heroes must get a girl. Rom-Com Heroines must get their man, no matter how terrible they may be. End of story. Though both Mary and Jack lead different genre plotlines, both the patriotic war movie and the rom-com encourage adherence to the status quo. Mary never questions why she loves Jack at any point. Despite Jack’s dismissiveness towards Mary and deadly jealousy toward David, he gets to go home- by virtue of his “heroism.” By virtue of Mary’s rom-com plotline, she gets her man in the end, despite his previous lack of interest. In the end, there are no possibilities, whether that be more romantic interpretations of Jack and David, or Mary alternatively using her independence and can-do attitude to do literally anything else.

Works Cited:

Wings. Directed by William A. Wellman, Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, 1927.

Poster and photoshoot taken from: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018578/mediaindex/?ref_=tt_mv_close

          In Rear Window, Lisa Freemont wears a lot of nice clothes. Jeffries, comparatively, spends most of the movie in some color variation of the same pajamas; his housebound situation contextually creates no need for anything else. Stella undergoes a few dress changes, but they are always the same shape: nice but never fancy house dresses that fit with the style of the times while allowing movement to take on physical domestic duties. Due to her work’s needs, she never wears jewelry, and aways appears with unchanging short hair. In other words, perfect for a home nurse taking on housework. Lisa, not yet with that domestic burden, comparatively wears six significantly different outfits in style and accessories. As I will argue, these style changes coincide with her character’s evolving motivation, reflecting character dynamism that Stella does not. Though her character retains a keen sense for glamorous fashion throughout, her outfits become increasingly “practical” for solving a case, reflecting her growing involvement through visuals alone. For length purposes, this post will focus on her initial outfit, her third green-and-white outfit, and her floral dress which at first seems to break the pattern of steady progression, but instead reflects a choice to increase tension rather than signal character reversion. Her outfits always mean something, and this mostly tracks her development. 

          In Lisa’s introduction, we see her in close-up, only zooming out to reveal her full outfit once Jeffries asks jokingly: “Who are you?” (Rear Window, 00:16:40). Who she is, we see, is a woman with elaborate black sandal heels, a flattering but not “vulgar” V-neck black top, complete with a voluminous white skirt- the biggest her skirt size will ever get. She also enters in a white shawl, the thinness of which makes it impractical for anything other than decoration, showing us that this is not a woman who works with her hands even tangentially like Stella. Her traditional 1950s glamourous wave hairstyle and her pearl matching jewelry conveys both elegance and money-someone dressing to be looked at, not to do.  

          In contrast, her first outfit after fully committing to the case signals the change in its increasingly practicality, albeit remaining glamourous than Stella’s. Her waves have now been pinned into an elegant but practical bun; Jeffries even calls attention to the change by asking about the change (01:06:21). She still wears all her pearl jewelry- with even her bracelets now having some sort of locks attached that perhaps signals her dedication to the case- but her blouse and pencil skirt are now more like Stella’s form fitting but loose enough style. Her shoes are also still high heels, but without the elaborate intricacies of her first pair.  In this scene, the simplicity makes her look like a very glamorous office worker, which makes sense, as this is her first outfit when dressing to work on the case. Aside from her last outfit with pants, this would probably be the most practical outfit for the infiltrating work she does in the following scene- less to grab onto or catch in something.  

            And so, Lisa’s next floral, flowing dress with hair down and stylized once more when infiltrating the apartment seems to contradict her previous growth. Practically, her outfit has more to grab onto if caught running away- which happens exactly. But when Thorwald discovers and attacks Lisa, her loosened blonde hair flashing across the screen even in the dark emphasizes the threat more than a tight bun would allowing (1:41:00). Similarly, Lisa’s digging up of the flower bed in her floral-patterned dress- her only pattern ever worn- to find body sublimely creates linkage and emphasizes the danger she faces that explodes when caught by the murderer. After all, Lisa’s solo infiltration of the murderer’s apartment is the bravest action in the film; her character has not regressed for that reason. This outfit, however, misdirects the viewer in thinking she might, and the impracticalness and subtle cues ratchet more tension in her bravery than otherwise than her pre- or proceeding outfit would. 

            As such, it seems by the end that those clothing choices will not be made again. We last see a de-accessorized Lisa in sensible loafers and pants, presumably ready for adventure. But her hair is still down and glamorous- thus signaling evolution rather than rebirth. Even so, her changing outfits reflect a dynamism in her character’s focus, and the one time that pattern breaks occurs when the film wants to heighten tension rather than signal regression.

Work Cited:

Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performances by Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly. Thelma Ritter, and Wendell Corey, Paramount Pictures, 1954. 

 

           Rear Window’s cinematic interest primarily concerns distance: the physical distance Jeffries cannot walk, the visual distance he supplements using his camera lens, and the emotional distance between him and Lisa at the outset. The film’s technical elements are no different. Rather than use traditional “scary music” in accordance with shocking visual cues to heighten tension, Rear Window uses soothing or peppy music at key dramatic scenes to further exemplify the script’s tension in making the film’s reassuring contradict with the camera’s tense scenes of action and intrigue. In doing so, the audience shares Jeffries’ sense of unease and frustration in getting to the truth despite other elements- be it the music or characters like Doyle- trying to convince him to leave it alone.

Though demonstrated in other scenes, this post will focus on the first scene in which the audience sees Thorwald’s face in closeup shortly after the one-hour mark. Before Thorwald enters the frame, all of Jeffries’ neighbors appear to be improving their lives in some fashion. Miss Lonely Hearts- now also seen in her first close-up- gets ready for a date (Rear Window, 01:01:40). The dancer receives lessons, the instructor heard saying she’s “much better.”  (Window, 01:02:41). Even Jeffries arguably faintly smiles (Window, 01:02:51). Amidst this, soft and sweet romantic music plays, complementing the characters’ emotional ease. Yet, as the music crescendos, Thorwald enters the close-up frame, punctuated by a brief diegetic traffic honking horn (Window, 01:03:17). The soft romantic song continues on, nevertheless. Thorwald’s face appears grim and unfriendly, but maybe not murderous. Even so, his forbidding expression deeply contrasts against the characters happiness and the score’s hopefulness. Like Jeffries, we, the audience, have no way to actually tell if anything else seems off about Thorwald besides the visuals seen by the camera- the score won’t help. Even as the closer angle prominently shows Thorwald’s laundry- perhaps after cleaning bloody clothes- the music gives no stereotypical screech to associate menace with the action (Window, 01:03:43). The audience is not thrilled, but tense, for like Jeffries, we are sure something bad has happened (if only because something not to would be a great anticlimax). But our observations are tenuous just like Jeffries,’ for the normal music assigns a certain normalcy to Thorwald’s action of merely taking his laundry home, so we don’t quite know what to think. This is not the only time this discord happens in the film- Lisa’s later high stakes infiltration of the apartment occurs alongside a calm, somewhat jazzy tune seemingly inappropriate for the apprehension Jeffries, Stella, and the audience feel for her (Window, 01:37:30-01:38:40). Rather than ratchet up the tension with nondiegetic music to accompany scenes of horror, Rear Window creates distance between the camera lens and the music to put us in Jeffries’ shoes. Something is wrong, but can we really trust only the camera lens to tell us so?

MLA Citation

Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performances by Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly. Thelma Ritter, and Wendell Corey, Paramount Pictures, 1954.