You Might Hate Catherine Morland, But You Were Probably Just Like Her

A few days ago, while paying for an oil change in New Hartford, the mechanic glanced at my copy of Sense and Sensibility that I had set on the counter while rummaging through my wallet for a credit card.

“Good read?” he asked.

“Huh?”

He nodded at the still brand-new looking Broadview Press edition.

“Yeah,” I answered as I handed the card over the counter, casting an eye at the book I needed to read for a class. “I’m only a page or so in.”

He took the card and swiped it, handing it back to me.

“I bought an iPad a while back and it came with…”—he paused and looked at the ceiling—“…Little Women and Pride and Prejudice.”

He waited a beat for me to say something, but I was caught up in the oddity of the moment—a man wearing blue overalls covered in grease and sideburns, telling me that he’d read a Jane Austen novel.

“I loved both of them,” he told me with a smile, turning around a receipt for me to sign.

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While the above anecdote might serve equally well as an example of my quickness to judgment, it serves also as a reminder that Jane Austen is the great equalizer. Who doesn’t love Jane Austen?

It’s crass, of course, to suggest that no one dislikes Austen’s. The social satire is not a genre for everyone. Not every reader can appreciate the whip-tight form of her novels’ narrations and the acrobatic insults that she manages to sneak into the page; in her hands, what would be a curt introduction to an antagonist becomes a slippery jewel of an insult.

Stepping back from the novels, however, it can almost seem like a wonder that the books are so loved. Invariably, they catalogue the romantic trials and tribulations in pre-Victorian England. They might easily be understood as merely social portraits of a place and time—‘historical novels’ instead of timeless explorations of love and friendship.

But they are timeless explorations—that’s precisely what makes them such a thrill to engage with. Even Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey, which I recently reread (I detested the first time I read it in freshman year), manages to speak to the way in which we navigate the social part of our lives.

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Perhaps as a freshman in college, I played the part of Northanger Abbey’s naïve protagonist Catherine Morland more than I thought. It’s easy to hate Catherine—she is a bumbling nightmare of confused emotions, idiotic worldviews and (this is the key) what seem like supremely silly social expectations. So I hated Catherine when I read about her freshman year (how can she not see that Tilney wants to marry her? how could she think the General is has some Mrs. Rochester-type scheme going on?), but on second reading, she clarified herself to me.

I think that all of us have felt, at one point or another, part of Catherine’s experience: the wondering, the confusion, the innocence. Catherine is a magnified version of me as a freshman. As much as I would like to remember my freshman self as a person bursting with confidence and knowledge of the world around me, I know that I saw the world as through a foggy window—the shapes of things like friendships, alcohol, internships, and (to sound like a true collegian) the ‘real world’ giant shadowy figures whose outlines were hardly discernible.

Rereading Catherine Morland’s journey towards properly negotiating her social world, I came to see that Catherine’s experience parallels mine—and everyone else’s. That is precisely the quality of Austen’s work that universalizes it. Even if Catherine becomes a royal pain by the end of the novel (and oh does she…), you can’t help but see parts of yourself reflected in her semi-charming naïveté.