Jane Austen's aesthetics and ethics of surprise.

In a memorable scene in Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to "the statue of surprize" spoken of by poets. (1) Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named "Surprize." (2) If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenth-century novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader's expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe's narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor's Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe's title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator's experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon's formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century news-ballads and early novels, "strange, therefore true" (5-6).

What the adjective "surprising" adds to "strange" is affect--the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the foreign, or the inexplicable. It also encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange; the mundane, too, can be arresting. In its participial ambiguity, the word aptly suggests the intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenth-century novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought; both will be seized by an experience of the new. As an adventure-narrative, Crusoe promises an aesthetic form of surprise (delight in the new); and as a spiritual autobiography of self-correction, it delivers a salubrious moral surprise (the experience of being jolted from inattention into awareness).

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, famous as a novel about novel-reading, crystallizes many salient features of the eighteenth-century discourse of surprise. Its young heroine Catherine Morland, who temporarily leaves the provincial routine of Fullerton for the social intrigues of Bath, is perpetually startled by the books she reads and the people she meets, even as Austen's narrator archly registers the presumably jaded reader's familiarity with novelistic conventions and the ways of the world. The emotion of surprise is important to all of Austen's novels, but it appears with particular intensity and frequency in this one. Even more than in Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion, the heroine's courtship is mediated by eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. Discussing the plots and merits of novels, acquiring the language of the picturesque, parsing the lexical nuances of words for the sublime ("shocking") and the beautiful ("nice"), learning to love a rose--all are alibis (and stimuli) for the growing erotic interest between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney. These things are, like Henry himself, novelties to Catherine, and it is partly for this reason that surprise figures so prominently in the narrative.

In reading Northanger Abbey through this lens, I wish to challenge critical accounts that either dismiss surprise as a symptom of the young heroine's naivete or overlook it in favor of its stronger relative, alarm; and thus to identify in the novel a powerful eighteenth-century idea and narrative device. Stuart Tave, the first critic to comment on the prevalence of the word in the novel, offers this gloss: "Surprise is a foolish thing, as it offers itself in, for example, the indeterminateness of what is 'odd' as it creates the emotion of an undefined 'alarm,' it is dissolved; in its stead is a process of understanding by means of 'observation' of what is and a determination of 'probability'" (37). (3) In what is essentially a novel of education, Catherine Morland must abandon her gothic suspicion that her host at the abbey, General Tilney, has murdered his wife, and yield to a clear-eyed reckoning of the probable.

Critics have since revised Tave's premise by retrieving "alarm" from the realm of the naive and feeble-minded to assert genuine, lingering concerns that the novel cannot resolve or contain. As Tony Tanner phrases it, borrowing Austen's own terms, "'Common life' has proved to be capable of producing surprising uncommonness; anxiety may be a form of controlled alarm" (73). The patriarchal tyranny of General Tilney, who summarily banishes Catherine from the abbey after discovering that she is not the wealthy catch for his son that he had imagined, is momentarily softened rather than decisively cured; and in Tanner's punning observation, the ghostly traces of "anger"--snobbery, cynicism, emotional coldness, patriarchal irritability--still linger. Similarly borrowing Austen's own terms, Claudia Johnson observes that Northanger Abbey is "an alarming novel to the extent that it, in its own unassuming and matter-of-fact way, domesticates the gothic and brings its apparent excesses into the drawing rooms of 'the midland countries of England'" (42). Echoing D.A. Miller's argument about the novel and its anticlosural discontents, (4) Johnson suggests that Austen draws our attention to the fact that "the convention of the happy ending conceals our all-too-legitimate cause for alarm" (48). The real cause, in Johnson's reading, lies in the arbitrary power of paternal figures like General Tilney, a domesticated English version of Radcliffe's villainous Montoni. There is no more incisive commentator on this dynamic than Austen herself, who summarizes Catherine's enlightened disenchantment at the end of the novel as a change of genre, feeling, and linguistic register: "The anxieties of common life began soon to succeed to the alarms of romance" (148).

It is not at all surprising that Austen's affective language would be so readily imported into late twentieth-century critical rubrics of anxiety, subversion, interrogation and critique; and Tanner's and Johnson's readings tell a fundamental truth about the novel's dialectic. These accounts, as well as Tave's, use the gothic as a reference-point: for Tave, a foil to the domestic and ordinary, for Tanner and Johnson, an amplification of issues of gender and power. But Austen's parodic staging of gothic sensations appears late in the novel, and by the time Catherine reaches the abbey, she has already experienced plenty of jolts, none of them tinged with the horror of Radcliffe or Lewis. I would agree with Tanner and Johnson that Austen asserts genuine causes for alarm in the novel, but I also wish to emphasize the importance of an often-overlooked emotional correlate. The difference between alarm and surprise is, in part, a function of time: the former is a state of sustained fear or anxiety; the latter is a briefer flare of feeling, a passage to some other emotional or cognitive state, and an experience that can be a source of either discomfort or pleasure, or both. Many readers have noticed the novel's stylistic unevenness, the awkward fit between the parody of romantic fiction and the Burneyesque narration of a young woman's entrance into the world; and by focusing on surprise, I wish to identify an emotional current that runs through both parts. (5)

I will make several arguments about the function of surprise in Northanger Abbey. First, it is a feature of the narrative itself, which is concerned with the reader's experience of the novel as both familiar and new; it is not only a state to transcend through rational judgment but also a figure of delight. Catherine's susceptibility to surprise serves not merely as a sign of naivete or ignorance but also as a moral register of other characters' foibles; like Candide's perpetual astonishment, it is an instrument of satirical commentary. Rather than merely mocking Catherine's susceptibility, Austen places it in dialogic relation with other ways of being in the world: the novel is peopled with characters who adopt defenses against shock, and these attitudes are as much a subject of comedy as Catherine's episodes of bewilderment. Such defenses come in several forms, often inflected by elements of masculine control: the assertion of special knowledge or omniscience, the attitude of stoic confrontation, the claim of intuitive or predictive powers. Surprise in Northanger Abbey might be called the emotional corollary to the novel's often-noticed preoccupation with the probable (6)--the ordinary or normal, the statistically typical, the logically inferred, the devoutly wished-for. Finally, as we shall see, it is a reflection of Austen's conspicuous concern with her readers' response to the novel--their familiarity with conventions, their literate resistance to surprise.