The modern edition states that it reproduces the 1793 version exactly, except for what the editors deem typographical errors, including “seemingly random and nonsensical commas.”This omitted comma is far from random, though, as it makes Matilda’s temporal and experiential situation either restrictive or nonrestrictive . Thus, the recent version implies that the Matilda who has suffered is a changed Matilda—her situation has been absorbed into her identity. The original version implies that Matilda is not that closely identified with her circumstances, just as it refuses to state something like “she was sad.” In the syntax of the Parsons’s emotional curriculum, situations can supplant a person, but they cannot become subordinate or equal to her. In this happy moment, Matilda’s travails remain, temporarily minimized but independent of her. It is the fact of these travails that matter most in the novel’s world—the relatable information, not the verbal expression of a sufferer’s response to them, which is too personal to be expressed or sympathized with. Indeed, words may be not only insufficient but also inappropriate, as suggested by a poem that Matilda finds scratched on the window of the room where the Countess of Wolfenbach was imprisoned by her husband after the murder of her lover and theft of her baby. The verse is necessarily brief, reading, “I am dumb, as solemn sorrow ought to be; / Could my griefs speak, my tale I’d tell to thee.”This passage of Wolfenbach is the one most often analyzed by scholars: Gillian Beer uses these lines as an example of the rhetorical force of incapacity,Karen Morton asserts the effectiveness of the window poetry as a mediated articulation of grief,grow bag for blueberry plants and Angela Wright quotes another of the verses to illustrate the novel’s powerful critique of marriage.

Deidre Shauna Lynch writes that when Matilda encounters this verse and others along with a handprint on the blood-stained floor of the room without knowing the Countess’s history, the writing “accentuates the other disappearances that this site of inscription has witnessed . . . The unknownness of that hand and the inaccessibility of the backstory behind the words are arresting.”In addition to way the discovered poetry makes the scene comparable to Radcliffe’s more reputable work, this is one situation in the novel where Parsons’s emotional writing can meet with approval from a modern audience, because the fact that Matilda encounters these words in writing, apart from the mysterious poet, removes the pressure of the fictional writer or the actual author to make some greater attempt at articulating emotion.In the context of these disembodied, departicularized, ghostly words, we do not expect a modern articulation of physical sensation or precise emotion from the composer or the narrator, so in this instance the lack of information can be as effective for us as it always is for the inhabitants of Parsons’s school of affliction. Many people today believe that the powerful and personal feelings that arise in response to extreme situations can never truly be explained to those outside that experience. In real life, we rarely expect someone who has lost a child to wrap up every feeling involved in that excruciating event and its aftermath in language and hand it to an uninvolved person. We are more likely to accept that the horrific nature of the circumstance makes the sufferer worthy of sympathy or aid even without knowing the details, and to believe that the feelings a person in that situation would experience are unimaginable, only knowable to those who have experienced the same event. In this way, Parsons’s style more accurately reflects our current beliefs than our own fiction, which routinely enters experiential territory that its readers and even its authors have not traversed firsthand. In this rare moment in the Parsons’s novel, our ethical convictions and aesthetic sensibilities are in accord with Wolfenbach’s school of affliction. Despite the inadequacy of language in Parsons’s emotional curriculum, stories can supplement the firsthand experiences of suffering by educating the audience about the types and proportions of human misery.

Soon after meeting Matilda, Mother Magdalene tells her, “Another time you shall know my sad story, and will then confess, of the two, I have been most wretched.”When she does elaborate on her various distresses, Mother Magdalene asks Matilda the seemingly rhetorical question, “[H]ave your troubles ever equalled mine?”Mother Magdalene’s storytelling helps teach Matilda how to measure and rank suffering, to subordinate her own troubles to the superior affliction of another. Though Santos argues that the stories in the novel perform a similar didactic function for readers, “as a mediating device that anticipates and regulates the reader’s response to intense feeling,” the form does not necessarily result in the intended effect. Napier, for example, criticizes the fact that the most dramatic moments in the novel reach the reader at a distance, through these stories of pain and woe, which she reads as the mistaken prioritizing of a moral message over vivid action.Both these readings disregard the fact that apart from any intended or actual effect on a reader, within the world of the novel the stories themselves play their own essential role in plot and character development. Deidre Lynch writes that Wolfenbachelevates books as “essential props for its protagonists’ projects of memory and mourning,” as “the pages the characters behold are often conceptualized as their legacies, either familial or cultural.”and I would argue that in the case of oral stories in the novel, this phenomenon is doubly true. Over the course of the novel, Matilda gains wisdom and perspective in part by listening to several tales of woe. The climactic scene even focuses on the telling of a sad story, as Matilda’s uncle slowly spins the tale of how he wronged her parents and deprived her of her birthright. The resolution of the novel consists not only of the typical restoration of Matilda’s status, mother, and lover, but also, and essentially, her learning more of the story of suffering that shaped her life. It is a story that gives her identity, and it also completes the process of educating her about the extreme forms of affliction others experience, to the point where she can see her own troubles in the proper proportions taught by the school of affliction and become a more altruistic person. Through all these messages and the techniques Parsons uses to convey them, the novel itself acts as its own school of affliction, with Parsons teaching her readers how to properly respond to her stories of suffering. The novel’s frequent assertions that emotions are indescribable mark off the narrative territory that the novel will not cover and attempts to recalibrate readers’ expectations, if they are not already primed to read incapacity for speech as a sign of deep feeling.

Instead of attempting to enter into the particulars of her characters’ feelings, Parsons encourages her readers to learn a culturally appropriate response to these types of situations—one that she models in the novel through her listening characters. Santos’s observation about the modeling of sympathetic response in the novel is correct as far as the intention built into the convention, if not correct about its actual effect on all readers. However, an essential part of this modeling is the way Parsons’s listening characters do not make a sympathetic response conditional to details; the telling and hearing of stories is not only conventional in itself but also conventional in its reliance on types alone for effect. In responding to Matilda’s story of evading her lustful uncle, the Countess of Wolfenbach is a perceptive and experienced reader who recognizes the character type of the damsel in distress and responds with the expected attention and sympathy. As these scenes in which a sufferer relates her sad story and a listener responds with compassion recur, Parsons uses repetition to teach her readers how to recognize generic categories and respond appropriately—to feel with the formula. Whereas The Castle of Wolfenbach represents a school of affliction that teaches a method of feeling with the formula of stories of suffering, its reception teaches a method of feeling against that formula. This is a different kind of literary emotional training, but one that still teaches that we do not need to know particulars in order to respond correctly. As I discussed in the first section of this chapter,blueberry grow bag eighteenth-century discourse about novels, and especially Minerva novels, created an atmosphere in which a work like Wolfenbach could be perceived as a part of a broader threat—one of a mass of new gothic fiction that appeared to cater to a public appetite for extreme emotion and to dull readers’ powers of aesthetic discrimination, and even, some feared, to encourage immoral behavior by portraying vice. Eighteenth-century critics considered Parsons’s writing to be somewhat better than most of the novels published during the growth of disreputable circulating libraries, and publishers reprinted it until the mid-nineteenth century in editions alongside reputable novels, but after this time it was forgotten. By the twentieth century, scholars knew Wolfenbach only as one of Northanger Abbey’s Horrid Novels, a label that implies it is both exhilarating and bad. It is this latter quality that scholars and amateur critics tend to focus on when they approach Wolfenbach through Northanger, and they often treat Jane Austen as a model for how to condescend to the emotional and aesthetic excesses of Wolfenbach and other novels of its kind. Scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries rarely mention Wolfenbach apart from its context as a Northanger Horrid Novel. In this context, scholars sometimes characterize Austen as a book critic who uses Northanger as a venue for teaching her readers to discriminate between Ann Radcliffe’s worthwhile gothic novels and her imitators, including Eliza Parsons. For example, Bette Roberts argues that the list of seven novels that Isabella recommends to Catherine “enumerates the negative extremes to which the reader may contrast what Austen considers to be higher expressions of the Gothic in the notably superior novels of Ann Radcliffe.”These novels fall far short of Radcliffe, Roberts explains, because although they “pretend” to advocate for morality, rationality, and self-improvement, the “disastrous stories” they include are not truly meant for edification of the “already perfect” characters but merely to “appeal to the readers’ emotions.”This critique overlooks the way that in Wolfenbach, Matilda demonstrates her growth not only by gaining her identity through the disastrous story that relates to her origins but also through learning to subordinate her own disasters to those of others and access universal wisdom.

Other scholars have argued that Austen’s novel teaches not only proper literary taste but also life lessons through aesthetic means. Robert Kiely demonstrates how Henry Tilney challenges Catherine’s indiscriminate usage of words as a means to enable her to transcend her own naïve perspective and exercise better judgment of people and situations, similar to how I argue Parsons uses stories of suffering in Wolfenbach. For Kiely, however, Austen’s un-gothic restraint and distinction are the key pedagogical tools, as he finds that “as a display of the disciplined mind and the well-chosen word [Northanger Abbey] does more than all the hysterical criticism of the periodicals to deflate some of the poses and excesses of Romanticism.”Jacqueline Howard argues that Kiely’s reading misses the ways that Austen not only ridicules gothic novels but also skewers the criticism of novels, making Henry an object of critique by styling his instruction as the masculine condescension “of those authoritative, male-authored pronouncements addressed to young women in conduct books and reviews.”Kiely’s analysis is the sort of scholarship on Jane Austen that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as being sadistically concerned with “the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson.”This critical fascination with the way Austen’s protagonists become chastened by experience has likely placed even more emphasis than Austen does on the problematic reading habits of the young Northanger women, underscoring the idea that Wolfenbach and the other Horrid Novels are pleasures that should not be indulged. Wolfenbach’s own pedagogical narrative appears to register as insufficiently harsh to these scholars, perhaps because Matilda does not experience the kind of shame that Catherine does when she gains perspective on her youthful feelings, or perhaps because Parsons herself indulges in too many aesthetic and emotional excesses in Wolfenbach.Emotional involvement of the sort that Wolfenbach portrays and encourages appears to some scholars as the fault that Austen intends to educate readers out of with Northanger.