not an orphan in the storm; she has neither patience for nor interest in being an accomplished musician or scholar. To put it another way, she has no extraordinary virtues commonly thought of as typical of a heroine of great adventures; indeed, Catherine "had by nature nothing heroic about her" (368). Rather, her virtues are the ordinary ones that ought to be expected from any moderately well brought up child: "she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny" (368).
How is it that Austen is at pains to describe Catherine in nonheroic terms but that she has placed Catherine at the center of the novel? The reader is quickly alerted to the fact that nothing in her ordinary upbringing prevents the adolescent Catherine from internalizing the unreal psychology of a gothic world and projecting it onto the real world. She has read books, "provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection" (368 9). This is of course the core and substance of the gothic genre, with its emphasis on external rather than internal action. In this sentence, which is as close to direct literary criticism as the chapter gets, Austen reminds us that in gothic melodrama, the heroine is in peril from dastardly villains who sneak around in castles. Peril exists elsewhere and in far different manifestations in the real world, which is the lesson that Catherine will learn by the end of the novel. This is of course Austen's argument, and the whole of Chapter 1 is devoted to creating a psychohistorical frame from which that argument will proceed.
Austen's ironic attitude toward the psychic reality of the gothic genre is also a moral judgment against the hold she plainly believes it has on the postadolescent female mind. Her objection is shown to be that the gothic presents itself as ...