Wrong girl: Catherine Morland, Alia Shawkat and the gothic anti-heroine
Epistemological nightmares in Bath and Brooklyn
Thanks for visiting! This is the Austen Connection newsletter. You can see all of the Austen Connection conversations including the podcast here. If you are not signed up yet you can take a few seconds to sign up for free, or support at any level - below - and get all of the conversations dropped right into your inbox.
Hello dear friends,
Happy weekend to you, and, a huge welcome to all of you who are new here at the Austen Connection. We’re glad you’re here!
Feel free to take a moment to say hi, in the comments, or to share this space with a friend who might like to join us. More below on why we’ve had the onslaught of new members here.
But most importantly: Welcome!
It’s the weekend and we have been watching the HBO Max series Search Party and contemplating, as with all things, the Austen connection. Especially the connection with Jane Austen’s first full published novel (written first, published last), Northanger Abbey - its hapless heroine, the imagination run amok, the absurdity of social structures, and the epistemological questions raised in both of these gothic/noir parodies as they dramatize a girl gone wrong by the power of imagination in a narrative that nevertheless forces a reexamination of our established orders, and forces on us the question: How do we know what we know?
And friends, this may sound like a lot of fun and I hope it is, but this essay is going to reveal that while true-crime girls-gone-wild makes a fun story, these anti-heroines and their plots are also forcing that fundamental question about knowledge vs reality and therefore forcing us to confront one of the most important questions of our day.
And here’s the question, again: How do you know what you know?
And what does this question have to do with the ravishing Alia Shawkat or the lovely Catherine Morland?
Let’s look!
With both Northanger Abbey, and with the series Search Party, here’s what you’ve got: You’ve got a girl with an outsized imagination creating a narrative that helps her fill in the blanks of her identity. You’ve got ordinary girl turned amateur sleuth, a favorite setup for fiction, from Northanger Abbey and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, to Scooby Doo. You’ve got a bored heroine who is overstepping in ways that take cringey to new levels. You’ve got the leisure-class, self-absorbed side-kick friends bolstering our heroine with comparative awfulness.
And you’ve got the ways of a chaotic, greedy world fixated on image and brand - Bath, and Brooklyn - that makes the imaginary world of our heroine look downright reasonable, and a classic theme that ultimately tells us: This story is somehow about society, its strivers, its absurdity, and its social chaos and the way it’s all garnished with actual dangers.
And you indeed have all of this with Northanger Abbey “starring” a young, naive Catherine Morland out in the big wide world encountering real life while reading lots of gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe, and you’ve got the television series Search Party, starring the mesmerizing Alia Shawkat as a young woman who’s consumed too many true-crime podcasts and holds a desperate need to act as the central protagonist of her own small, aimless life.
And: Just as we’re in a culture that has gone mad for true-crime podcasts, ever since the release of the This American Life outtake Serial in 2014, Jane Austen in 1799 was in a world that had gone mad for gothic horror stories - and they’re name-checked in Northanger Abbey, with references to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) .
Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey simultaneously celebrates and sends up the gothic fiction genre - first by stating plainly that novels are true art and how dare you think otherwise especially as you’re reading one right now; and then she also proceeds to challenge the formula by laughing off the idea that Catherine Morland, with her penchant for rolling in dirt and her sensible parents, could ever be anybody’s heroine.
Northanger Abbey is the place where Austen creates a homage to art and novels, urging novel writers, “let us not desert one another, we are an injured body”, but also offers an alternative type of novel, one that deploys realism and all its banalities, its contradictions and the real-lifeness of it all, even while submitting to, subverting, and mastering the genre.
And you indeed have all of this with Northanger Abbey “starring” a young, naive Catherine Morland out in the big wide world encountering real life while reading lots of gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe, and you’ve got the television series Search Party, starring the mesmerizing Alia Shawkat as a young woman who’s consumed too many true-crime podcasts and holds a desperate need to act as the central protagonist of her own small, aimless life.
Search Party, like Jane Austen, has created a story that, through its aimless, young Brooklyn Americans, examines and parodies an overrated story genre of our time, and is giving us quite a lot to think about in the process.
Both stories follow a group of young people navigating a world plagued with class and status anxiety, a lack of authenticity, and a boredom and banality, from which emerges a young woman seeking to overcome these forces through the power of imagination and to tackle real or imagined evils.
In fact, you might say that in both stories, the central plot and also the humor come from the tension between the banality and boredom of these young people’s leisurely lives juxtaposed with the real and imagined dangers they might encounter.
And in both stories, we are shown the absurdity of imagined dangers even while we’re surrounded by real ones we don’t see because they are so ordinary. It’s the ordinary gothic of ordinary life, as traversed by an ordinary anti-heroine.
Even a wrong girl might be righter than you
But let’s cut to the chase: What is the point? Is there a moral to this story?
Jane Austen’s stories always appear to have a moral, but most often readers have the rug pulled out from under that moral, and in Search Party your rug is being jerked as well.
Northanger Abbey, like Emma, appears to be about a girl who’s getting it wrong by following her over-imaginative impulses, until she’s brought back to reality by an older, wiser, happens-to-be-attractive person.
But that’s never the actual moral: What is happening in a Jane Austen subtext is that you have a young woman who is navigating something, and as she oversteps and explores we end up learning more about the Something - our world and its absurdities and its injustices. And we find that we’ve been tricked into identifying with a young heroine who happens to have agency, desire, and a certain amount of power. And that shift in perspective changes something.
What is happening in a Jane Austen subtext is that you have a young woman who is navigating something, and as she oversteps and explores, we end up learning more about the Something - our world and its absurdities and its injustices, and we find that we’ve been tricked into identifying with a young heroine who happens to have agency, desire, and a certain amount of power. And that shift in perspective changes something.
But what is the takeaway from Search Party and our heroine Dory Sief’s relentless search for a missing college mate whom she didn’t even know (the fabulously-named Chantal Witherbottom), and who turns out to be (spoiler alert!) an airhead just sorta hiding from life?
New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum, who writes brilliant television commentary, answers this question for us by summing up the theme of the show this way: It’s about “the danger of thinking too big when your own life feels small.”
Henry Tilney could not have said it better, Emily!
But deep readers of Northanger Abbey will point out that young Catherine Morland is ultimately righter than her older, wiser love interest Henry, whose whole brand is Correct. While she gets the facts wrong about Henry’s father, scary General Tilney, she gets the character right: He might not have murdered his wife as her wild imagination suggests, but he did likely make his wife miserable. And ultimately General Tilney even proves to be an actual danger to Catherine Morland, casting her out of the Abbey in the middle of the night unchaperoned. It’s a Regency-era gothic of the ordinary and the everyday.
In Dory Sief’s case, the irony - we can always follow the irony - is that while she spends the entire first season searching for danger that only manifests itself in her imagination, in fact she ends up herself attracting the very danger and even enacting the biggest crime of the story, even to the point of (spoiler alert!) committing an actual murder.
But is Dory, like Catherine, right about anything?
One thing that gives both of these dark comedies their moral compass is the smart, with-it boyfriend. Yes, I know - but bear with us here!
In Northanger Abbey, the boy is easy to locate: Henry Tilney is the voice of reason, if a bit arrogant and self-assured, and that easy self-assurance tips us off to the fact that ultimately even his viewpoint is flawed.
In Search Party, the with-it boyfriend is actually the ex-boyfriend, Julian, wonderfully played by Brandon Micheal Hall. He’s a journalist who is skeptical about everything, is making a career out of exposing liars, and provides the patient, reasonable Norm to all of the absurdity populating the world of Search Party. You can breathe a little easier every time Micheal Brandon Hall enters the scene.
But: Even though Dory is stepping in it more and more and distancing herself from Julian’s brand of sanity, somehow, we feel Dory has something to show us. Everything about the storytelling in Search Party - the music, the audio effects - create an intimacy with Dory’s consciousness that allows us to see the world alongside her, from her point of view, and that POV is looking out on some grim stuff.
Disparity, greed, marginalization, lots and lots of snobbery, boredom, and conspiracy.
And Catherine Morland - looking at the Thorpe siblings, the “white glare” of status-mad Bath, and the tyranny of scary General Tilney - is also seeing some grim stuff.
Also very grim are just about every single social gathering depicted in Search Party, from dinner parties and road trips, to a candlelight vigil and a cocktail party that morphs into a cult gathering. All of these events outwardly conform to social norms, but are turned inside out by sinister underlying motives that give way to greed, vanity, and ultimately real danger.
Catherine Morland is ultimately righter than Henry, whose whole brand is Correct. While she gets the facts wrong about Henry’s father, scary General Tilney, she gets the character right … It’s a Regency-era gothic of the ordinary and the everyday.
So while the readers and viewers of Northanger Abbey and Search Party know our heroine is definitely on a cringingly misguided path, we also know that everything around her is laden with the gothic. Real danger and chaos abounds. The astute reader and viewer watching Catherine Morland and Alia Shawkat know: Our girl might be wrong, but the world she’s inhabiting is wronger.
The Thorpe siblings will kill you
One big reason we continue to give Dory Sief and Catherine Morland the time of day is not just because we believe in their naive dreams of being Something but also because they are surrounded by people much worse than they are.
Just like Catherine Morland has to deal with the self-centered, absurdly mercenary Thorpe siblings, Isabella and John, Search Party’s Dory is surrounded by the self-centered absurdly-mercenary Portia (played by Meredith Hagner) and Elliott (John Early). Both performances are hilarious and worth the price of admission, with more sheer, hilarious self-serving misanthropy going on than John and Isabella Thorpe could ever hope to deliver, with apologies to Jane Austen.
The astute reader and viewer watching of Catherine Morland and Alia Shawkat know: Our girl might be wrong, but the world she’s inhabiting is wronger.
What these terrible, hilarious characters create in Austen and in Search Party is not only a fantastic portrait of a vapid, greedy society but also because these characters are absolutely typical - stereotypes even - they are also treacherous. And this treachery coming from these stock characters disorientates us morally, shifting the landscape of what’s right and wrong.
While our heroine is looking outwardly for spectres and murderers, the characters surrounding her reel us back in, revealing that the treachery is sitting across the table.
It puts us on an alert about the dangers of the very structures we’re navigating, all the while thinking that the dangers are coming from [wave hand noncommittally] out there.
The danger, says Austen and Search Party, are sitting right next to you.
The female imagination is a wild thing
But the biggest thing that Catherine Morland and Dory have in common, and the thing that we don’t talk about often enough when we talk about Jane Austen is: Imagination.
Imagination, female imagination, and the power of the female imagination and the female artist.
Imagination is really the Main Character of both Northanger Abbey and of Search Party.
Both Catherine and Dory have the ability - and it’s a superpower - to transcend their circumstances and the uncertainties of the world and their place in it, through channeling a new reality that is both brighter and darker, and to do it through pure imagination.
Catherine has devised an entire alternative plot about castles, about villains, about places like the actual place Northanger Abbey, and about love and murder.
Dory has devised an entire plot around the mysterious disappearance of Chantal Witherbottom, artfully giving the disappearance an overbearing importance, appropriating the tragedy to elevate her own sense of self, and casting herself as the potential decoder and savior behind the mystery of Chantal.
Both narratives can be completely wrong, as we’ve said. And in the process of showing the power and process of the narrative and then anticlimactically (and humorously!) dispelling it, Austen and Search Party show us something else more interesting: the power of narrative and the power of art over our own identities, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the danger of letting narrative impose itself on your life, and on the power of art and story to both misguide and transform.
Your everyday epistemological nightmare
Which takes us back to that big question. Look at how these stories are really about the nature of reality and our information about that reality, and how we use that information to shape our world.
In several passages in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen points to doubts about what’s real, and to shifting foundations of knowledge, examining how we know what we know, and calling our epistemological assumptions into question.
This happens in key passages that have now become meme-friendly they are so well known in the Austen fandom.
The most famous is when Catherine Morland goes creeping around the private quarters of the Abbey to see if she might discover clues that show how Henry’s father, the awful General Tilney, might have murdered Henry’s mother, the late Mrs. Tilney. And in the midst of this expedition she’s caught by Henry himself, who interrogates her about what she’s doing. In what may be the most cringey scene in all of gothic literature, the honest, befuddled Catherine makes it clear that she is wondering if Henry’s father might have offed his mother - and she’s doing it, as Henry proceeds to remind her, in a great house in the bucolic, boring English countryside. It’s an awful moment when a great Imagination is brought into the glaring light of day. And it’s just this kind of cringey awkwardness that is pervasive in Search Party and in nearly everything the character of Dory does in the first two seasons. We’re always privy to her outsized imaginative and wrongful surmises, and it’s impossible to not watch the crash into reality we know we’re heading for.
But while this tension between imagination and reality is what the critics of both Northanger Abbey and Search Party find as the moral to the tale, what Austen is doing is much deeper, political, and philosophical.
[W]hile this tension between imagination and reality is what the critics of both Northanger Abbey and Search Party find as the moral to the tale, what Austen is doing is much deeper, political, and philosophical.
In every passage, Austen is challenging our sense of what we know and how we know it.
In the Henry Tilney confrontation described above, he ends with a mini-lecture where he admonishes Catherine to: “Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you …”
Look around you! Henry says. Do you see murderers?! But friends, it’s easy to be confused by this passage.
Is Henry Tilney suggesting we should just believe what our education system and our society norms are showing us?
Many readers and critics through the ages have seen this as it appears on first glance to be, a reigning in of a wild female imagination. But we miss what is happening on the deeper level here, which is that in the midst of the chaos of Austen’s world - a world, as the critic Claudia Johnson points out, of enclosures, riots, revolutions, and actual conspiracies - Austen is urging us to not look for villains or angels in Bath or in Brooklyn, not look for absolute goodness or evil, but to realize that in our humanity and in our political systems, there will be both good, bad, in between, and many contradictions. It’s harder than we think to know what we know!
As Catherine herself comes to realize, in the pages right after this embarrassing confrontation with Henry and with her wild imagination, she observes: “among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.”
All of this plotting and suspense has ended up with, well, you know, there’s an “unequal mixture of good and bad.” What an anti-climax, Jane!
But yet, this is radical in the Regency, where women were depicted as either temptresses or angels, and it’s radical today! Just try to imagine for a moment: The people we do not agree with might not be evil! Really? In Brexit England, in Trump America, in Bath and in Brooklyn, and in the Jane Austen Society, and all over the world today, there might actually be a “mixture of good and bad” in all our hearts?
Austen knew it then and we’re still discovering it out now - there’s good and bad in all of us. Don’t believe the disinformers and the dividers. Read, observe, listen, learn, and carefully consider your sources - and how you know what you know.
Catherine, Dory, Henry, and Julian, like all of us, need to astutely observe, stay informed, consider their sources, and weigh up the probabilities, to shape their world - in politics, in family, in life, and in love.
Austen knew it then and we’re still figure it out now - there’s good and bad in all of us. Don’t believe the disinformers, the dividers, basically don’t believe the politicians. Read, observe, listen, learn, and carefully consider how you know what you know … in politics, in family, in life, and in love.
And before we go, a quick word about literary Absurdity: Because literary, philosophical Absurdity is something you might have attributed to Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and French artists, writers, film-makers and philosophers.
But look again and we find it right here in a Bath ballroom circa 1799: Perhaps the bigger epistemological speech that Henry Tilney delivers happens in a rather confusing passage that we rarely see discussed, because it is so confounding. It’s at a lighthearted dance scene in Bath, where Catherine and Henry are first enjoying some flirtatious conversations, and Henry lands this zinger on us: “Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.”
Where did this come from? How did a charming young man flirting with our heroine about what she might write this evening in her journal suddenly turn into a philosopher with obscure rantings on the nature of being and knowing.
But there it is: Henry, and through him Austen, challenging us with: Who are we, what are we doing here, and how do we know what we know, all delivered in the midst of a Bath ballroom.
In our day job here at the Austen Connection, we produce radio talk shows, and we are watching my friends what we like to call the two Ds: the Disinformation and the Division that is taking over and ransacking our civil discourse, our political structures, our sense of community, and our democracy.
The nature of being and knowing and how our information shapes our society and our lives is something we think about daily.
And one time in a talk-show planning session, one of our brilliant co-producers, who runs media literacy projects, posed that question simply: How do you know what you know?
How indeed. Think about it, and come up with an answer every day. And also, stay in this community where you can reach out to us any time to discuss anything we bring up here, and you’ll find these discussions in your inbox, where we’re continuing the conversations about the stories of Austen and how they impact our lives and our world today. You can also simply reply this email to connect with us. More to come!
Thanks for being here, friends, and thank you for sticking with this conversation which was the most Serious Way Possible to look at what are two very fun stories - Search Party and Northanger Abbey.
Have you watched Search Party? What do you think of the Austen connection to this series? Do you see any other connections we missed here, to that series or anything else you’re watching or reading right now?
Let us know!
Coming up!
We have upcoming posts on how Jane Austen’s Heroines Get it Wrong all the while showing us what’s right. Also an upcoming post on Real Life in the Regency (it’s Realer than you think, and Realer than any Austen adaptation will ever show), and most importantly: Season 3 of the Austen Connection podcast, dropping in August! In the meantime, you can catch up on the first two seasons of the Austen Connection podcast on Spotify, Apple, right here on Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Stay tuned, stay in touch, and have a beautiful weekend full of Everything Right and not much wrong.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
Cool links and community:
Learn more and support media literacy and democracy - with ISpeakMedia
We got a shout-out! The Austen Connection has been featured several places lately - and we are amazed and grateful! Thanks first of all to SubstackInc, for featuring the Austen Connection right now on its homepage and on the Substack app - which is a wonderful thing to download and read. It will transform the way you consume great writing, reading, and information.
Also: Electric Literature listed this community as one of the “14 Literary Newsletters You Need in Your Inbox.”
And my Substack “Bookstacker” writer Gayla Gray and her newsletter SoNovelicious featured the Austen Connection podcast in her regular feature One Extraordinary Bookish Podcast. Loved this conversation with Gayla - check it out, and also check out SoNovelicious!
Claudia Johnson is a go-to author on Jane Austen for us here: Check out her book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel
Join us for an upcoming conversation about adapting the story of Persuasion, with playwright Sarah Rose Kearns and a panel of artists, Aug. 13, at 4pm EST: https://theholytheatre.betterworld.org/donate
Here’s Emily Nussbaum on Search Party, in the New Yorker
This American Life’s “Serial” podcast - if you have not listened to this, why not?
SoNovelicious - an ongoing conversation about books, book podcasts, and what to read next:
Thanks, Elizabeth! Let us know what you think of the series!
This show has been on my to-watch list for a long time - I think it’s time to bump it up to the top of the list! Great article - and there’s Austen again with her sneaky subversiveness. :-)