Reading and the sociality of disappointing affects in Jane Austen

Carmen Faye Mathes

pp. 85-103

in: Stephen Ahern (ed), Affect theory and literary critical practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

This chapter reconsiders the role of disappointment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey by demonstrating how minor letdowns motivate non-matrimonial relationships. For Catherine Morland, the novel's heroine, just as for the community of female novel readers with whom she stands, disappointment is an affect of momentum and transition, which allows for the substitution of one social arrangement for another. Yet the new, often sororal relationships that these arrangements encourage also invite biting social critiques, which challenge the novel's apparent solidarity with its female readers and frame disappointment's sociability as a double-edged sword. While disappointment helps form and reform communities, it also positions disappointed readers against the cool-headed reading practices to which Henry Tilney (Catherine's love interest) and Austen herself in her letters appear to subscribe.

Cited authors

Austen Jane