Udolpho, or novel bashing

So far, it's feeling a little bit like Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded. Which, as I'm sure you remember, did not fill me with joy.

I mentioned previously that Jane Austen mocks this book in Northanger Abbey, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. The one I feel like mentioning at the moment is the fact that she engages in novel bashing while, at the same time, pointing out that novelists who engage in novel bashing are hypocrites.

It's obvious Austen has little respect for anyone who would read a novel like Udolpho, yet she also makes a point of mentioning that it's a bit rich when a novelist tries to establish the intellectual superiority of their heroines by suggesting they never read novels.

There's some sort of hidden cleverness in this. Like someone who sings a parody song about how parody songs show a lack of imagination.

I love the tradition of novel bashing. It's been around as long as novels have. Apparently, so the argument went, novels encourage sentimentality, which is a grave handicap to foster in a young woman. It makes them want to do crazy things, like marry for love instead of money. It also excites their imaginations, which is just asking for trouble, really.

Really, it's this strange desire we have to trash whatever is popular and enjoyable. These days, we bash novels which are popular enough to have everyone reading them. Twilight and the Potter novels are bashed by all and sundry just because they're insanely popular. Otherwise, they would be completely ignored. I wonder of the Brontës had to deal with the same thing? I can just imagine the kind of trash talk that would have gone on about Jane and Rochester...

When I was studying 18th Century literature I used a piece from an afterplay for an exam. Can't remember the title of the thing at the moment, and the Internet isn't as helpful as it could be. I'll have to look it up when I get home. Anyway, the whole play was about a girl who read too many novels, which made her susceptible to being emotionally manipulated by a conman who was trying to woe her in order to steal... something. Can't remember if it was her father's fortune or her virtue.

Actually, what I remember most about that afterplay was the girl's father. Man, that guy was a jerk. She wouldn't marry the man he chose for her because she was in love with the conman, so he spent the whole play calling her a "wanton hussy". That happened a lot in 18th Century plays, actually. Not to mention folk songs dating back to the Middle Ages. Girls who were saving themselves for a certain someone special being called whores and hussies by their fathers, who were essentially hoping to "sell" them to the highest bidder. Talk about double standards. Or maybe that was mixed messages.

What was I talking about anyway? Oh, yeah, novel bashing. Fun stuff.