Deciphering Henry Tilney

I read Northanger Abbey for the first time slightly over a month ago in preparation for my senior thesis on Jane Austen and the form of the novel, and ever since then I’ve been going back and forth about what I think of the novel’s purported “hero” Henry Tilney. I find the protagonist Catherine to be simple in a cute sort of way—strong-minded and genuine in her opinions even when she’s not willing to speak up and assert them, young and a bit naïve but without it being really infuriating—but Henry is a mystery that I just can’t seem to wrap my mind around.

Part of this, I suspect, can be blamed upon the BBC. I hadn’t read Northanger Abbey a month and a half ago, but I had seen the 2007 TV movie starring Felicity Jones and J. J. Field. I’d found it to be much like its heroine (short, cute, fun), and almost like Pride and Prejudice lite (all the wordplay and banter but none of the ferocious arguments or long-held grudges). In the film, Field’s Henry Tilney is affable, and he delivers his character’s more questionable lines with a smile that makes you forget that he’s not making sense. I bought into Tilney’s silliness as a result of the film, and went into the novel expecting to find him, if nothing else, a good match for Catherine, willing to tease her and challenge her in such a way that would promote their developing relationship as well as the intelligence of both individuals.

I came away from my first reading of the novel with a pretty favorable account of him. He was a little more jokey, and a little more likely to cut others off for the sake of expressing his own intelligence, than I had expected, but his playful humor left me feeling that he was, in a strange way, a male prototype for Elizabeth Bennet. The language used to describe them is, in fact, incredibly similar. Henry is introduced as having “a very intelligent and lively eye,” “fluency and spirit,” and “an archness and pleasantry…which interested” (NA Vol. I Ch. III). In comparison, Darcy relates that Elizabeth’s countenance “was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 6), with “a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody” (P&P Vol. I Ch. 10). Just as Henry teases Catherine by asking her a series of rote questions about her enjoyment of Bath, Elizabeth pursues conversation-by-formula with Darcy during their dance at the Netherfield ball. They are both witty jokesters who wouldn’t be able to stand having many acquaintances at whom they were not allowed to laugh.

But where Elizabeth’s mocking laughter is tamed (at least a little) by her increasing concern for Darcy’s feelings, Henry’s wordplay remains primarily unchecked, and herein lies my problem. Upon a second reading of key passages, I found myself running across instance after instance in which Henry’s wordplay, rather than seeming playful and ridiculous, began to appear authoritarian, a method to prevent others from speaking their minds rather than a way of encouraging light and easy conversation. Take, for example, a conversation between Henry and Catherine, in which Catherine speaks first:

“I do not understand you.”

“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

“Me?—yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“Bravo!—an excellent satire on modern language.” (NA Vol. II Ch. 1)

On a first reading, the English major in me saw those last two lines as a frankly brilliant satire on modern language, but upon re-reading, I realized that Henry is talking more to amuse himself than to enlighten or entertain his conversational partner, who honestly doesn’t understand what he means. When he interprets her confused (and possibly annoyed) remark as satire, he is applying his own reading to the situation, for his own sake. Henry Tilney certainly speaks well enough to be unintelligible.

But even when he’s intelligible, his manner of talking isn’t always agreeable. He calls his sister “stupid” to her face and seems to consider it as an endearment (or at least not an offense); Eleanor is clearly used to this kind of address, and therefore keen to make sure Catherine doesn’t take her brother too seriously. Frankly, under these conditions, I’m surprised that Catherine manages to take him seriously enough to fall in love with him. He takes over topics of conversation introduced by her and does his best to direct them toward his own experience and interests; when Catherine cuts him off from extolling himself for being so well-read, he retaliates by quarreling with her diction:

“But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest;—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is for ever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.” (NA Vol. I Ch. 14)

Again, Eleanor must step in to assure Catherine that this man of her dreams isn’t really as rude and obnoxious as he seems—but even as she does so, she encourages Catherine to “change” her diction to suit Henry’s tastes. It’s obvious that Eleanor’s spent too much time with her brother, and has given up opposing him in these petty arguments. Some people might think this saintly of her, but I identify too much with the fierce and sprightly Elizabeth Bennet to find the idea of forbearance terribly appealing in this instance. (As a side note, when working on my thesis over the past few days, I’ve found my thoughts continually interrupted by a scene of Elizabeth Bennet and Henry Tilney meeting on the dance floor after their respective marriages and sharing an intriguing and flirty power-play of a conversation before going their separate ways. In case you were wondering, in my head it’s a power-play Elizabeth undeniably wins.)

All of this has left me asking myself a question I simply can’t answer: why does Catherine marry him?

The problem with this question is that it’s more a question of theme than of character. I can understand completely Catherine’s attraction to Henry Tilney; it’s one that I felt acutely the first time I read this novel, and in a world of limited options and minimal power for women, perhaps I would have made a similar choice. What I can’t understand is what their marriage means on a larger level—what Austen is trying to get at. I’m of the opinion that marriages in Austen’s novels pull a lot of thematic weight in addition to what they do for the plot and the form. I’m convinced that, on a metaphorical scale, the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy singlehandedly averts the French Revolution from happening again on English soil (there may be more about this conviction in a future post); Elizabeth herself suspects that her marriage could “teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was” (P&P Vol. III Ch. 8), and I don’t think this is an overstatement.

But what do Henry and Catherine have to teach us? Why should the admiring multitudes even give them a second look? Henry Tilney would probably be quite happy at the idea of teaching others; many of his interactions with Catherine are didactic in nature, intended as correctives to her overactive imagination or supplements to her aesthetic education. He seems destined to become the husband-as-teacher, with Catherine as a perfect and eager student, but their intellectual relationship seems sadly one-sided, a conversation in which one voice will always overpower the other. Perhaps, in time, Catherine will learn (as Eleanor has already learned) to stop speaking out, to laugh at her husband’s outlandish assertions rather than to challenge them. But I can’t help but think that she deserves a better future than this, and so I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something I’m missing, about Henry or Catherine or the whole scale of the novel, that would set this all right.