The Socialization of Catherine Morland

And as to most matters, to say the truth, there are not many that I know my own mind about.' Every schoolboy knows Catherine Morland as an innocent who goes out to discover the world as romance and finds instead the harsh realities of the social nexus in which she lives. In the satirical plan of Northanger Abbey, the naif finds that she has made her mind up not, like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot, on the basis of insufficient evidence, but on the wrong kind of evidence altogether-Gothic romance proving no appropriate model in a country neither medieval nor romantic. Yet like that greater naif whose mind was turned by reading high-flown romances and who found them inapplicable to his time, the heroine even in her mediocrity-reflects the grand ironies of human experience in the structure of her perceptions. Catherine, like the Don, is matched against not one or another of the antagonists encountered in the course of her travels, but against the entire network of tacit assumptions and habitual behavior which constitutes the individual's cultural milieu. How she learns to make her way in the world by acquiring the cultural forms under which its members order their own thought and conduct-this is the universal drama which Northanger Abbey instances. The realm of literature is the most obvious exception to Catherine's disclaimer, quoted above; in literary matters, she well knows her own mind. Without her reading, which gives her a set of terms by which to order-erroneously, as it happenssome of her perceptions, she might not be aware of herself at all, much less know the external world in even a rudimentary way. It is not alone her scanty store of social facts but her flimsy equip

Social science · Socialization · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies

• Quixotic Reasoning

  Open Access•Karin Kukkonen•Paragraph•2014

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