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“A Frivolous Distinction:” Self-Fashioning in Austen's ​Northanger Abbey

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“A Frivolous Distinction:” Self-Fashioning in Austen's ​Northanger Abbey Burbano 1 University of Florida “A Frivolous Distinction:” Self-Fashioning in Austen’s Northanger Abbey ​ Anna Burbano Undergraduate English Honors Thesis Dr. Roger Maioli Dr. Pamela Gilbert April 18, 2018 Burbano 2 Abstract Using the naïve heroine Catherine Morland as an ignorant agent of truth, Jane Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey, guides its audience beyond the superficial veil of ​ ​ Regency England to reveal characters whose natures—confined within the bounds of polite society—are intrinsically linked to consumerist dependencies. The widespread classism and self-absorption seen throughout the characters of Northanger Abbey ​ extends itself to idealized identity construction, a device powered by fashionable consumption and purposeful dress. In this thesis, I hope to explore how self-fashioning through fashion is thereby introduced into the narrative and employed by the author as a ​ didactic characterization tool, a technique largely ignored by large-scale critical works but relevant in the light of tracking Austen’s budding literary prowess in Northanger ​ Abbey. For this, I am using the concept of self-fashioning as introduced by Stephen ​ Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt describes self-fashioning as the ​ ​ fashioning of one’s identity and public persona within contemporary social standards. This includes adopting conventional, upper-class dress to create oneself into a work of art. With this definition in mind, I will also be examining how consumerism is at the crux of Northanger Abbey and is a necessary consideration towards making sense of ​ ​ fashion (and self-fashioning) in the novel. As a result, my exploration will situate consumer practices within Austen’s broader representation of a consumerist society. Introduction When faced with the promise of a male suitor in Bath, Catherine Morland misjudges the importance of a fashionable appearance. While she lies awake for “ten minutes” deciding between two muslin evening dresses, the omniscient narrator of Northanger Abbey adopts a ​ ​ moralistic speech to disarm the reader of Catherine’s bias as a keen consumer: “Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim,” the speaker pontificates, “Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone” (78). The intersection between dress and direct narrative form, felt most keenly in the passage, begs the central Burbano 3 question of how fashion, which plays a key role within the narrative of Northanger Abbey ​ informs each character’s social identity. Thanks to the rise of literary fashion criticism, contemporary scholars have not been remiss in discussing the strong presence of fashionable consumerism in Northanger Abbey, Austen’s earliest completed work. Their interpretations ​ ​ examine how Austen uses fashionable consumption as a personification tool for characters in the text and study the socio-economic factors that play into these consumerist attributes. Such seminal critiques have been offered by Claire Hughes, who studies Mrs. Allen’s and Isabella Thorpe’s characters in relation to their consumerist tastes to show the lurking and dangerous power of clothes; Juliet McMaster, who interprets Catherine’s maturation as partly stemming from her ability to read beyond both dress and language; and Susan Zlotnick, who reads Catherine, Isabella, and Eleanor Tilney as having different interpretations of female agency in the marketplace.1 Other scholars, such as Robert Merrett, judge the text as a critique on a burgeoning middle-class England, and still others read critically into Austen’s text to link together fashionable consumption with antisocial pleasure, as does Rob Horning, or patriarchal privilege and imperial politics, as is the case with Lauren Miskin.2 1 Hughes, Clair. “Talk about Muslin: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.” Textile, vol. 4, no. 2, ​ ​ ​ 2006, pp. 184–197. Taylor & Francis Online, ​ ​ www.doi.org/10.2752/147597506778052287. McMaster, Juliet. “Clothing the Thought in the Word: The Speakers of Northanger Abbey.” Persuasions, vol. 20, 1998, pp. 207–221. Jane Austen Society of North America, ​ ​ ​ http://www.jasna.org/assets/Persuasions/No.-20/mcmaster.pdf. Zlotnick, Susan. “From Involuntary Object to Voluntary Spy: Female Agency, Novels, and the Marketplace in Northanger Abbey.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 3, 2009, pp. ​ ​ 277–292. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533931. ​ ​ 2 Merrett, Robert. “Consuming Modes in Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen’s Economic View ​ of Literary Nationalism.” Persuasions, vol. 20, 1998, pp. 222–235. Jane Austen Society of ​ ​ ​ North America, www.jasna.org/assets/Persuasions/No.-20/merrett.pdf. ​ Horning, Rob. “Northanger Abbey and Antisocial Pleasure.” The New Inquiry, 21 Feb. 2012, ​ ​ www.thenewinquiry.com/blog/northanger-abbey-and-antisocial-pleasure/. Miskin, Lauren. “‘True Indian Muslin’ and the Politics of Consumption in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, ​ ​ pp. 5–26. MUSE, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/576758/summary. ​ ​ Burbano 4 These arguments—while successful in addressing how Austen pushes certain views of her characters through their relationship to shopping, apparel, and sartorial conversation—lack further inspection of why Austen, who is so purposely vague on issues of dress and fashionable consumption in her other novels, invests so much energy into dress descriptions and sartorial conversation in Northanger Abbey. Analyzing this text in the ​ ​ context of material consumption and identity formation, I intend to fill in the analytical gap by investigating to what effect Austen uses fashion as a deliberate tool with which to navigate interpersonal relationships and formulate identity in Northanger Abbey and why she does so. ​ ​ My central argument is that within Northanger Abbey, fashion and identity formation are ​ ​ intrinsically linked. To a large extent, the characters of Northanger Abbey construct and ​ ​ fashion their self-identity through fashionable consumption. They clothe themselves in the latest fashions and follow Bath conventions for dress impeccably so as to fit in society, though this dependency on consumerism reveals an imperialist and classist reality within the context of Regency England. I will argue that Northanger Abbey’s numerous allusions to ​ ​ clothing, not nearly so pronounced in Austen’s other novels, represent Austen’s juvenile attempt to ‘draw’ her characters by embedding personality traits onto their choice of dress. Moreover, I will maintain that the way Austen typifies her characters through fashionable consumption is purposely didactic. Teaching her readers to view fashion analytically, Austen presents one-note characters, such as Mrs. Allen and Isabella Thorpe, as foils to Catherine Morland and Mr. Tilney, whose combined commercial expertise is untainted by manipulative or self-serving motives. Throughout my paper, I will also investigate how Austen uses the threads of fashion, and talk of fashionable consumption, as a deliberate tool to navigate Burbano 5 interpersonal relationships within the text and provide commentary on early nineteenth-century English social customs and behavior. An emerging consumerist society in Jane Austen’s England In order to understand how fashionable consumerism operates in Northanger Abbey, it ​ ​ will be helpful to first define the consumerist tendencies of Regency England in the early nineteenth century. With this in view, I situate the text within its contemporary socio-economic environment to provide a working understanding of the factors that play into each major character’s fashionable identity. Centuries before Austen’s birth, sumptuary laws and the high price of textiles had defined distinct differences in the way they convey social status and emphasize the distinction between the aristocratic and those beneath them. Fashion had altered and unfolded, to a large extent, very slowly. But by the late eighteenth-century, fashions in England changed on an unprecedented scale with the birth of a consumer society.3 Both men and women suddenly found themselves at the heel of short-lived fads, dictated to them by the whims of vendors and manufacturers.4 Wives were expected to bargain shop and to repair or repurpose old clothes to the advantage of their households, and women of all ages were familiar with the concept of dressing to advantage, though their increasing participation in the consumer market was invariably trivialized by contemporary narratives that sought to undermine women’s growing economic responsibilities.5 The emerging commercial society, which provided women with both domestic distractions and the opportunity to exercise 3 Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: from Fox Hunting to Whist ​ - the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England. Simon & Schuster, 1998. ​ 4 Taylor, Jane. “‘Important Trifles’: Jane Austen, the Fashion Magazine, and Inter-Textual Consumer Experience.” History of Retailing and Consumption, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. ​ ​ 113–128. Taylor & Francis Online, ​ ​ www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2373518X.2016.1198624. 5 Parker, Sarah. Fashion and Dress Culture. Literature Compass, 11 (8), 2014, pp. 583-591. ​ ​ ​ Burbano 6 limited agency, presented a new challenge for women living in the Regency period. For the purpose of this thesis, let us consider where Austen stands within the arena of ever-changing fashion. As seen in her letters, Austen was no stranger to dressing up nor too shy
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