Theme of Friendship

Nearly anyone who has been to the movies in the past few years has probably seen a film adapted from one of the novels of Jane Austen, who is having one of those revivals of interest that is sometimes inflicted upon artists from pre-mass media eras. And the most enduring scene from each of these movies is the last one, in which everyone of any importance is happily married off.

And yet despite the nearly deafening clangor of marriage bells in Austen's works, and despite the amount of mental anguish that her characters devote to matchmaking and being matched, the theme of friendship is just as important as that of romantic love, although rarely acknowledged to be so. If Austen's pages are full of endless dialogue about the importance of love and marriage, it is important to note that all of this dialogue is going on between friends. After a brief summary of Austen's work, this paper looks at the importance of friendship in Northanger Abbey (1818) and how the theme of friendship relates both to the importance of marriage and to the characters relationship to the larger society.

Austen (1775-1817) has become known not simply as one of the major female English novelists - a position that she held for several decades last century - but simply one of the best English novelists because of her brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction. In her work can be clearly seen a clear transition in English literature from 18th-century neoclassicism to 19th-century romanticism

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itself )Johnson, 1995, p. 110). Austen's novel follows the travails of Catherine Morland, who while visiting Bath with her friend the flighty if pleasant Mrs. Allen, falls in love with the young clergyman Henry Tilney. Retiring to the ancestral Tilney home, Morland - who has herself read Radcliffe's novel - sees ghouls and nightmarish horrors behind every door. However, the only true horror proves to be Henry's father, whom he ignores when he asks for Catherine's hand in marriage. Catherine's and Mrs. Allen's friendship is at the core of the novel, for without it none of the particular events of this novel would take place. It is also important in that it is friendship to a large degree masked as a familial relationship" Mrs. Allen is as much mother to Catherine as friend (Johnson, 1995, p. 112). Catherine's friendship Eleanor Tilney is also central to the novel, and the fact that it too comes in the guise of familial ties is important in understanding Austen's use of friendship in the novel. Friendship is not meant to supplant marriage; that is Austen's official line and certainly a reflection of the time. And yet, it is also true that friendship does quite often supplant marriage, and Austen's novels (as is life itself) are

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