Film and the Novels of Jane Austen

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. This paper applies a model of cultural criticism to Austen's 1818 novel Northanger Abbey as a way of elucidating the importance of female friendship as opposed to marriage for the characters in this book. This paper also examines how the theme of friendship relates both to the importance of marriage and to the characters relationship to the larger society (Ash and Higton, 1995, p. 12).

Austen's works, including Northanger Abbey, reflect the the comfortable and genteel (if never quite wealthy) world in which she was raised. Born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, where her father served as a rector, she spent her entire

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s as examples of fictive kinship û Mrs. Allen is a surrogate mother or perhaps an aunt, Eleanor Tilney is at first a surrogate sister and then a sister-in-law û Austen seems to suggest that women's friendships, even when independently arrived at, are in fact supported by a web of familial and therefore male-based family links (Johnson, 1995, p. 126). Isabella Thorpe is something of an exception to this rule, and it is therefore no wonder that she is more of an observer and more of an outsider to Catherine's world. Catherine can dismiss her intimacy in the following way not only because Catherine has not yet matured, but because Isabella does not fit as easily into the role of sister-friend as does Eleanor: Of her other, her older, her more established friend, Isabella, of whose fidelity and worth she had enjoyed a fortnight's experience, she scarcely saw any thing during the evening (p. 98). Austen was, of course, aware of the fact that while many of the women in her world felt their most important connections were to their friends, there were those women who could not shift (or did not want to shift) their primary allegiance from the men to whom they were supposed (by social and cultural dictates) to orient their lives and t
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