It shared space with Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in an 1854edition by The Booksellers, presumably because by that time publishers suspected it wouldn’t sell on its own. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, critics attempted to discern whether the Austen’s Horrid Novels were even actual books. It is surprising that a novel with six printings in sixty years could be so completely forgotten, but Richard Burton in his 1909 study Masters of the English Novel reveals the belief that novels like the ones satirized in Northanger were ephemeral productions with no cultural value: “the tendency of eighteenth century fiction, with its handling of the bizarre and sensational . . . was but an eddy in a current which was setting strong and steadily toward the realistic portrayal of contemporary society.”Even after Wolfenbach and the other Horrid Novels had been rediscovered, their recuperation was halfhearted. Writing in the 1920s, Michael Sadleir, a writer, publisher, and book collector who reignited interest in the gothic, accuses Parsons of cynically writing to the formula of what would sell and asserts that her moments of “astringent character-fiction” are so marred by the trappings of terror novels that “one turns embarrassed from the sight of them, as from bare patches” in a formerly fine carpet.Folio Press eventually reprinted Wolfenbach in 1968, but as part of a collection damningly titled The Northanger Set of Jane Austen’s Horrid Novels, and after that publication,garden grow bags it went out of print for decades. I will return to Wolfenbach’s publication history later in the chapter, considering the novel’s later editions in conjunction with recent responses.
Now that I have broadly addressed how the novel arrived amid a debate about literary value and moral and emotional norms and how Parsons’s novel became caught up in a persistent discourse about genre fiction and distinction, I will devote the next section to Wolfenbach’s own engagement with these issues.The Castle of Wolfenbach is often criticized today for its heavy-handed morality, and its strongest moral messages revolve around suffering. These messages are didactic in both content and form, and their didacticism is essential in understanding the novel. In the Wolfenbach, women absorb and impart life lessons through stories of affliction. The central stories of affliction are those of Matilda Weimar; her mother, the Countess Berniti; and two of her mentors, the Countess of Wolfenbach and Mother Magdalene. The young heroine, Matilda, was raised as an orphan by her uncle. We later learn that her uncle murdered her father, kidnapped baby Matilda, and replaced her with dead infant, making her mother believe she had lost both her husband and her child. Though Matilda had a peaceful childhood, when she matured, her uncle lusted after her and planned to entrap her in marriage by raping her. She overheard his plans and fled, finding shelter at the Castle of Wolfenbach in the beginning of the novel. Wolfenbach is thought to be haunted, but its supposed ghost is actually the Countess of Wolfenbach, who was imprisoned in a wing of the castle for eighteen years after her tyrannical husband murdered the man she had once intended to marry, took her baby, and tried to kill her. After Matilda discovers and befriends the Countess of Wolfenbach, the Countess is kidnapped, and Matilda goes to live with the Countess’s sister, the Marchioness de Melfort.
Through her, Matilda meets the Count de Bouville, who falls in love with her, but Matilda does not want to disgrace him with her apparent lack of status and enters a convent. At the convent, she meets Mother Magdalene, whose parents died tragically and left her and her siblings in poverty, which she refused to remedy by becoming the mistress of her admirer, choosing the convent instead. Matilda, the Countess Berniti, the Countess of Wolfenbach, and Mother Magdalene all tell their tragic stories, and these stories of past sorrows drive the plot as much as the present loves and dangers do. For Sue Chaplin, who recently analyzed the novel, the significance of these life histories is the way they show how “Female experiences of trauma are . . . mirrored back and forth across the generations, and women rely on the support of other women to narrate and expose these injustices” in the absence of legal protection from men.These narratives of injustice, however, serve as more than cautionary tales or extralegal support in the novel. Through the stories of suffering that Matilda hears throughout the novel, she learns cultural norms for responding to others in distress, and she gains a sense of her own place in the world. The Countess of Wolfenbach and Mother Magdalene, Matilda’s two primary instructors on suffering, inform Matilda about the properties of affliction and the proper response to the afflicted. These older women, a countess and a nun, describe suffering in a remarkably similar way, though they have never met. While they hope Matilda will be spared the tribulation they have endured, they also acknowledge its benefits. The Countess informs Matilda that she is “but young in the school of affliction,” and Mother Magdalene tells her that she is “yet a novice in affliction.”
These metaphors imply that the troubles of life, like an educational institution or a religious order, initiate the inexperienced into specialized knowledge that can be very valuable, and while Matilda’s early persecution has begun this education, she has much to learn. This “school of affliction” teaches its students to gauge the proportion of different human miseries, which Parsons presents as an essential skill. Because Matilda has not yet encountered life’s hard lessons, the Countess tells her, “[Y]ou can feel only for yourself.”Suffering, according to these learned older women, makes a person less self-absorbed. As Mother Magdalene explains, “[W]e are all apt to magnify our own troubles, and think them superior to what others feel . . . when you know more of the world you will know also that there are varieties of misery which assail the human frame,—and ’tis our own feelings that constitute great part of our distress.”In this view, it is desirable to think less of one’s own difficulties, not only because it reduces the pain of them but also because it is essential for absorbing the knowledge that affliction imparts: the taxonomy of human misery. These women believe that suffering takes distinct forms, “varieties” that can be categorized. The individual experience of suffering is measurable, as one can assess what constitutes the “great part” of it, but a person tends to “magnify” the true size of their suffering in relation to others’ unless she learns, through experience, a sense of proportion. Advanced students in affliction have learned to quantify and categorize misery and can better assess their own portion of it as well as evaluating that of others. This mandate that people ought to prioritize others even in the midst of their own distressing circumstances could strike a modern reader as sanctimonious insensitivity, and the idea that this practice is part of a necessary education in ranking painful situations could feel to today’s readers like a bizarredissection of human experience. However, within the novel, this lesson is the key to ethical action, based in principles on which all wise and virtuous people can agree. The characters’ profession of a belief in universal standards and measurements for human suffering corresponds with eighteenth-century philosophy. Adam Smith, author of the most famous eighteenth-century description of sympathy,tomato grow bags often writes from a place of absolute assurance in his statements about the proper amount to feel and the proper degree to express those feelings. In 1759 he writes, “Grief and resentment for private misfortunes and injuries may easily . . . be too high, and in the greater part of mankind they are so.”This assertion could easily come from Parsons’s Mother Magdalene, as well as from other philosophers of Smith’s time, who confidently distinguish among many categories of experience, taxonomizing human life. Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, goes even further than Smith, offering a “catalogue” of pain, and its opposite, pleasure. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , he provides numbered lists of each type of pain and pleasure, further subdividing these into numbered lists of the situations that produce these types.To readers today who have been trained to value particularity and contextual specificity, this may seem incredibly reductive, though I will later consider how we still make use of certain norms for categorizing and responding to suffering when it is fictional.
The belief in the quantifiability of suffering that eighteenth-century philosophers hold in common with the characters of Wolfenbach relies on the concept of universal truth. The Countess of Wolfenbach and Mother Magdalene, who do not know each other, are the main purveyors of this universal truth, and as such, they share many similarities. Aside from being persecuted women who have derived wisdom from misery, each performs a similar function in the plot, mentoring Matilda in a time of vulnerability, and each has a long story of woe to tell that is deferred to enhance interest of the kind that its early reviewers alluded to. Scholars have focused on some of these similarities to draw parallels between these characters and others in the novel, or to other fictional women, or to real women.However, looking at the form of their speech separates these two characters from comparable ones. Unlike other characters in the novel, Mother Magdalene and the Countess speak often in aphorisms, especially about virtue and suffering. The form of the aphorism implies universal truth; thus, these two sound not only like each other, but like the voice of morality itself. Mother Magdalene professes that “reason can subdue every affliction but what arises from a condemnation within.”In a similar tone, the Countess states that “the best claim to a generous mind, is being unfortunate with merit that deserves a better fate . . . the truly benificient mind looks upon every child of sorrow as their relation . . . when beauty and virtue suffer, from whatsoever cause . . . they receive a superior gratification that have the power of relieving sorrows, than the receiver can in accepting the favors.”These maxims strongly resemble each other as well as the voice of the narrator, who informs the reader that “beauty in distress has a thousand claims upon a susceptible mind.”The resemblance of their speech can make the characters seem conventional to the point of two-dimensionality, but the fact that the two wise women characters and the narrator deliver similar maxims is not lazy writing, but rather reveals the institutional character of the novel’s emotional values. These aphorisms suggest timeless truths through their form alone, and they further contain abstractions that elevate the universal over the particular. The Marquis and Marchioness, who informally adopt Matilda, become “a generous mind” or a “benificent mind”; Matilda becomes a “child of sorrow” or “beauty and virtue”; the Countess becomes “beauty in distress.” These abstractions and the precepts that contain them foreground concepts while making the actual individuals and circumstances inconsequential.This minimization is reinforced by the fact that suffering can spring from “whatsoever cause,” as if the actual details of the oppression are unimportant. This form of speech, and the beliefs it represents, imposes rules and obscures particularity in a way that modern readers would probably resist. Yet this abstraction expresses the novel’s emotional instruction—painful experiences teach a person to rise above self-involvement and the distraction of details and instead recognize and learn to respond properly to the misery of others. This recognition and response, in the novel’s view, can occur only when a person learns objective standards for assessing suffering. Parsons suggests that an abstracted view of suffering allows people to see universal moral truths, and the fact that her wisest, most afflicted characters speak in the same manner as each other and as the narrator implies that truth takes the same form for everyone, once they learn how to access it. In this school, teachers, texts, and students all embrace the same institutional values and mission, prioritizing universality over self-interest and difference. The Marchioness, though also an older woman who mentors Matilda, has enjoyed love, ease, and fortune, so she cannot counsel Matilda on torment.