6 - Northanger Abbey and Austen's ‘wandering story’

Summary

The complex space of the ‘domestic’ novel

In Jane Austen's Emma (1815), the well-meaning but prattling Miss Bates, on seeing Mr Knightley pass by on horseback, opens a window and tries to get him to join the company assembled in her house. On hearing his rival Frank Churchill is one of the party, Knightley asserts ‘I could not stay two minutes. I must get on to Kingston as fast as I can’. As Miss Bates tries to get him to stay in her rambling, circuitous way, Austen makes a clear contrast with Knightley's clipped, direct, straightforward mode of speaking:

‘So obliged to you! – so very much obliged to you for the carriage,’ resumed Miss Bates. He cut her short with, ‘I am going to Kingston. Can I do anything for you?’

The dialogue ends with Knightley simply riding off as Miss Bates’ attempt to thank him for a consignment of apples is left trailing in the air. ‘Ah! he is off’ she relates to the party inside. It is a pattern that is seemingly repeated throughout Austen's novels; long-distance, rapid, linear mobility is the preserve of men, while the female, ‘domestic’ world, with its circumscribed realm of actions and interests, is subsidiary, existing less as its own realm but rather framed by its relation to the world of business and hurry. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet bristles when Mr Darcy suggests Charlotte Lucas should be congratulated for settling at ‘so easy a distance of her own family and friends’. Elizabeth replies: ‘An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles’. Darcy's rejoinder, that ‘what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance’ lays bare the different expectations for men and women. A succession of heroines – Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot – all have their mobility restricted in ways that the Knightleys, Darcys, Churchills, and Wentworths do not. In Emma, after Harriet is importuned by gypsies on the Richmond Road, Mr Woodhouse trembles at the news ‘and, as Emma had foreseen, would scarcely be satisfied without their promising never to go beyond the shrubbery again’ (332).