Jane Austen’s Refinement of the Intradiegetic Novel Reader in Northanger Abbey: A Study in Ricoeurian Hermeneutics of Recuperation

Novel readers inside the narrated world are, Monika Class argues, a foundational trope in the diachronic development of the realist novel in English. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey can be seen as a game-changer for the intradiegetic novel reader, since Austen achieved a composition that ambivalently elevates the genre both on the level of the story, in which the two novel readers, Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney, feature as the heroic love match, and, on the level of narrative discourse, which cues readers to mock and empathise with Catherine. In so doing, Northanger Abbey remodels the Quixotic inflection of the early realist novel in English. To gain literary acceptance, eighteenth-century novelists honed ‘the mimetic powers’ of the genre to render representations life-like. Influential advocates like James Beattie and Clara Reeve defended the novel as an instrument of moral edification, plausibility, and modernisation, opposing it to the old romance. For Beattie, ancient romance of chivalry is just a container for extravagant excess, wild fabulation, and unfounded invention. I should note that the eponymous knight of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quijote de la Mancha (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is a, if not, the prototypical intradiegetic novel reader. According to Beattie, however, Cervantes’s novel is an attempt to end the ‘frantick demeanour [sic]’ of the ‘Old Romance’. Beattie describes Don Quixote’s story as the romance-induced descent into madness and thus as a warning that reading romances leads to the corruption of moral and mental health. This one-sided interpretation plays an influential role in the variations of the intradiegetic novel reader in the long eighteenth century since it associates the trope with the ridicule, naivety, inexperience, gullibility, and feminized inferiority of both novel and romance readers.