Calling something interesting can be a way of opening critical space for a previously dismissed text

Claudia Johnson claims that Northanger “does not ridicule gothic novels nearly as much as their readers.”She argues that Austen makes both Catherine and Henry out to be bad readers of gothic novels—one for seeing them as true life and the other for seeing them as mere entertainment, when the reality is that they are somewhere in between. Ultimately, she writes, Austen encourages her own readers to approach both fiction and society “with critical detachment.”Natalie Neill also emphasizes the value of critical distance in Northanger, arguing that this is the skill Catherine needs to learn, and that Austen prompts readers “to assume a detached critical relationship” with her own novel.In different ways, all of these scholars interpret Northanger as a sort of textbook that teaches professional reading. Just as Catherine learns to discriminate, attend to context, and become less emotionally involved, so do attentive readers of Austen, they argue. These techniques allow for a detached, scholarly interest—one that is different from the unconditionally involved interest Parsons models in Wolfenbach, and which I will examine more fully in the final section of this chapter. What these readings of Northanger do, even when they argue for the value of gothic fiction within Austen’s text, is use Austen’s gothic parody to delineate developmental hierarchies of reading and writing and imply that they correspond to mature perception, feeling, and action in everyday life. Within these hierarchies, Parsons’s Wolfenbach and the other Horrid Novels are positioned as immature—aesthetically unrefined, morally indiscriminate, and emotionally inappropriate. Northanger and its criticism thus work together to teach ways of condescending to novels like Wolfenbach, making it likely that readers who come to Parsons’s novel through Austen or Austen scholarship will be aware that in reading one of the Horrid Novels,blueberry box they are reading a work that they ought to think is bad, and that its badness can serve as model for what not to write, read, feel, or do.

For nonprofessional readers, this awareness may result in readings that resist the emotional immersion that Parsons encourages, but it does not necessarily result in cold condemnation. Despite or because of being dismissed and recommended as “horrid” and puerile by Northanger and its criticism, Wolfenbach continues to be read and reviewed by amateur critics. As the first named and first published of the seven Horrid Novels, it is the most reviewed on sites like Goodreads and Amazon, and it is the one most thoroughly covered on blogs. In expressing their responses to the novel, amateur reviewers often adopt an authoritative tone and teach other readers how they ought to feel about the work. This instruction often recommends paying attention to formula more than detail, much like Parsons’s own attention to categories in expressions of emotion. Modern amateur critics, though, like scholars, suggest that every aspect of the novel, emotion included, is equally typical. Parsons’s repetition of sad stories, which seems intended to train her readers to recognize them as emotional conventions and respond appropriately, appears to backfire with modern readers. While a reader who has spent time inhabiting Parsons’s school of affliction and studying the beliefs that support its literary-emotional conventions could have the conditioning necessary to feel with the formula of these repetitious emotional displays, recent reviewers treat them as just another genre cliché. One blogger asks, “How do you know when you’re reading a gothic novel? Characters faint then weep, and then faint some more and then someone comes to their rescue.”Another writes, “The story speeds along, packed with tales of woe, heroes and villains, titles and society, swooning and fainting, weeping and wailing, swooning and fainting.”On Goodreads, a reviewer writes that “Eliza Parsons included damsels in distress, swooning and fainting, weeping and wailing, incest, murder, kidnapping, a haunted castle . . .” In keeping with the codified, disdainful language used for literary clichés, these reviews echo each other when mentioning emotional conventions; this is especially striking in the repetition of “swooning and fainting, weeping and wailing” in the last two examples, as if reviewers are actually supplying each other with the exact language with which to critique the conventions of the novel.

This echoing recalls the way Matilda learns to speak in the aphorisms of her mentors by the end of the story, but if these reviews provide education in the recognition of and response to emotional categories, it is far from the kind that Matilda learns. In each of these examples, the reviewer includes the emotional conventions alongside genre conventions of plot, character, or setting . It seems as if, due to different literary-emotional training, today’s readers see the cues for feeling as simply conventions. The first review of Wolfenbach, from 1794, provides a good comparison to this, as the writer inserts an emotional response in the midst of a listof plot events: “he [Matilda’s uncle] also discloses the measure of his crimes; restores her [Matilda] to her mother, from whom he had likewise taken her when an infant and burying himself in a convent . . .” Though this writer also places emotion alongside other literary features, he phrases the plot in specifics while making the emotion general and even minimizing it in parenthesis. This eighteenth-century professional critic suggests through his sentence structure that his own emotional response has a subordinate place in a review, as a sort of embarrassed aside that interrupts the real work of relating the situations from the novel in detail. He carefully elucidates the circumstances in the novel while minimizing a personal emotional response to those circumstances, implying, like Parsons, that situations are more relevant than personal feelings to well-trained audiences of stories of suffering. In contrast, the modern amateur critics generalize about every aspect of the novel, making both situations and emotions unimportant. The earlier review and the later ones judge Wolfenbach as inferior to good novels, but they model different forms of judgment. Parsons’s contemporary makes distinctions, detailing the plot, separating plot summary from emotional response, and characterizing the work as not “one of the first order, or even of the second” but possessing “sufficient interest” to command some degree of engagement.The online reviewers quoted here have inherited the critical tendency to flatten distinctions among formulaic gothic works that began in the decade of Wolfenbach’s publication and was likely enhanced by the pedagogical dimensions of Northanger and its scholarship.

Going beyond the modeling of conventional disdain that the amateur critics above demonstrate, some of the online commentary about Wolfenbach is explicitly emotionally didactic, but rather than employing categorical thinking to achieve sympathy, as Parsons does, this emotional education uses categorical thinking to achieve amusement. This trend is especially obvious in blog entries and comments from the Gothic Lit Classics Circuit Tour of October 2011 . The tutor of this particular read, in addition to educating her “student” on eighteenth-century culture and gothic conventions, also educates the reader on how to enjoy the novel, by advising her student to count the number of times a female character bursts into tears. They both continue to mockingly quote these dramatic passages.It is worth noting that ironically tracking weeping in novels is not a twentieth or twenty-first-century phenomenon. Henry Morley famously edited an edition of Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling in 1886 that included an “Index to Tears” for the amusement of a Victorian audience distant from the conventions of eighteenth-century sensibility.Many of these amateur critics, however,blueberry package go further than offering humorous commentary on the novel by instructing their community of readers on how to feel. The kind of emotional curriculum shown in the “so bad it’s good” blog post and comments or the LibraryThing exchange, while teaching to feel against the formula of Wolfenbach, is still feeling—but substituting pleasure for pity. Scholars generally do not express pleasure in what they present as failed writing—pleasure for scholars is most expressible in terms of interest, as I will discuss in the following section. As scholars, we value critical emotion—emotion that requires labor, or specialized taste, or that resists what appear to be the intended emotions of the work—more than feeling with the formula, which, when it lines up with the intended emotions, appears passive, naïve, and boring. Nonprofessional reviewers are not sanctioned by their community for enjoying formulaic fiction, but when a novel like Wolfenbach comes prejudged as “horrid” and unsophisticated, they may be less inclined to express simple enjoyment, even as they are also disinclined to aloofly dismiss it. By modeling for other readers how to enjoy what they call bad writing, they teach a way of valuing formula that incorporates critical judgment, even if it favors categorical responses over careful discernment—which, as I will demonstrate in the next section, is not entirely without its own categorical tendencies. Even if scholars believe that The Castle of Wolfenbach possesses no engaging qualities in and of itself, they may express their engagement with the project of literary recovery that it allows. Deidre Lynch, writing about scholarly affects, describes the “pleasures of laboriously recovered, recondite information” that literary historicism allows.

Devendra Varma mentions this feeling in his introduction to The Northanger Set of Jane Austen’s Horrid Novels in 1968, when Wolfenbach had been out of print for more than a century. He writes, “[T]his piece of research has brought to me many moments of delight and given me the thrill and pleasure of literary archaeology.”At that time, Varma was one of only a handful of modern scholars to assess Wolfenbach and the other Horrid Novels, and the opportunity he had to help bring the books back into print and inform modern readers about the authors and works that played a large role in Jane Austen’s novel is one that few scholars today ever get to experience the like of. Diane Long Hoeveler was in a comparable position in 2006 when she wrote the introduction to the first major edition of Wolfenbach since Varma’s, and she makes a similar statement, though a less fervent one. She writes, “In a decade that saw the fall of a King and the rise of Emperor Napoleon, this novel spoke about the attraction and allure of France and the French people to the British bourgeois imaginary. Unpacking that allure even today is an engaging exercise in literary archaeology.”The pleasures of literary archaeology are difficult to share with others— Varma’s is for him alone, and Hoeveler’s is for readers with a strong background in history. Thus, scholars expressing the joys of recovery work with Wolfenbach are not likely to transmit their enjoyment to others, but they may transmit their less positive attitudes. The attitudes scholars express are important because the authoritative nature of scholarly discourse could influence other readers, instructing those readers on how a text ought to be approached. Rita Felski writes that “the authority of critique is often conveyed implicitly . . . via inflexions of manner and mood, timbre and tone.”A critical mood spreads because, she explains, “the student learns by imitating the teacher, adopting similar techniques of reading and reasoning, learning to emulate a style of thought,” which includes attending to “displayed dispositions” and “emulation of both tone and technique.”This emulation becomes apparent in the way several amateur reviewers paraphrase Hoeveler’s introduction to the modern edition, repeating her assertion that the novel is important as a window into history. While they endorse her interest, they also copy her condescension. Hoeveler shows disdain for Parsons’s tendency to seem “blatantlynationalistic in her celebration of British superiority” and writes that in her “bourgeois agenda” Parsons “goes so far as to say in this novel that middle-class people are more attractive than aristocrats because they do not stay out late at night partying, drinking, and losing their looks.”Similarly, a reviewer on Goodreads expresses patronizing amusement when noting, “The book also has a very strong patriotic bent and wouldn’t you know it, England is the best country in the world” and “If [ . . . ] the rich gave up late nights and gambling, there would be nothing to improve.”Of course, readers possess agency in how they respond to any novel, but we cannot discount the fact that scholarly experts act as teachers, especially in their introductions to novels. When these teachers introduce the uninitiated to a novel like Wolfenbach, they draw readers’ attention to certain features, and they encourage certain kinds of responses.