Thorpe’s action,—he “only laughed, smacked his whip, encouraged his horse, made odd noises, and drove on” (104)—though a comical description mocking the gothic novel’s tendency to involve a kidnapping of its innocent heroine, shades a darker under meaning. Thorpe really is kidnapping Catherine, keeping her against her will and taking advantage of the fact that she has “no power” to escape his carriage. Should readers dismiss this passage as simply a mockery of the gothic novel, they would miss one of Austen’s points. Certainly, Northanger Abbey is a satire of the gothic novel genre, but this scene gives readers a much greater sense of the mayhem that Thorpe is capable of creating, acting the part of the gothic male villain.

Of Thorpe’s most egregious lie, of course, both Catherine and readers remain unaware until the later stages of the novel, when Henry reveals that Thorpe had grossly exaggerated her financial circumstances to General Tilney. Austen gives specific details regarding Thorpe’s deception. Driven by “his vanity and avarice,” Thorpe engages General Tilney’s interest in Catherine by “doubling what [Thorpe] chose to think the amount of Mr. Morland’s preferment, trebling his private fortune, bestowing a rich aunt, and sinking half the children” (234), and also declaring that Catherine was the “acknowledged future heiress of Fullerton” (235). The only way to make such a ridiculous lie even more absurd is to have it retracted by its very creator—exactly what Austen contrives. Still driven by his vanity, now wounded, and his ruined friendship with James, Thorpe “hastened to contradict all that he had said before to the advantage of the Morlands” (236). However, Thorpe’s meddling causes such significant, however temporary, distress and destruction. He fashions more lies about Catherine, telling the General that the Morlands were

in fact, a necessitous family; numerous too almost beyond example; by no means respected in their own neighborhood, as he had lately had particular opportunities of discovering; aiming at a style of life which their fortune could not warrant…(236).

Thorpe’s communication leaves the General “enraged” and “terrified” (236) and Thorpe’s action in the novel concludes with this final cause of mayhem. Thorpe leaves nothing but disorder and confusion in his wake. Upon hearing the General’s intent of forcing Catherine unceremoniously from his home, Catherine can think of the situation only as being “as incomprehensible as it was mortifying and grievous” (219). Her “agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers” (219) are the result of Thorpe’s path of destruction. However, readers cannot consider Thorpe as a full-blown villain, as he was driven more by his own vanity than by a desire to ruin Catherine’s happiness. As far as readers know, Thorpe was unaware of the uses to which the General put his misinformation, making Thorpe ever so slightly more innocent than we wish to think him. As infuriating a character as he is, Thorpe is not fully “Wickhamized,” mainly because Thorpe is driven by vanity, rather than malice and vendetta.

Though Austen hints at Thorpe’s potential villainous tendencies, it is clear that her experimentation with her villains is closer to its early stages in Northanger Abbey, and perhaps her revision of Thorpe’s character is limited to some extent. While Thorpe tells lies to accomplish his means on numerous occasions, readers never actually read his conniving conversations. Because readers follow Catherine as the heroine, and Thorpe always acts separately from her, Catherine’s ignorance is shared by readers. Though Catherine sees Thorpe speaking to General Tilney—literally watches him spin his web of lies about herself and her family—she is none the wiser about the conversation’s content until nearly the final chapter of her story, but this does not prevent her from feeling “something more than surprise, when she thought she could perceive herself the object of their attention and discourse” (111). In her other novels, Austen’s villains are more directly interactive with the heroine, as is Wickham and his frequent conversations, embedded with lies, with Elizabeth. Wickham seems to be a more complex villain than Thorpe, for the sole reason that he is successfully deceptive while operating on Elizabeth, a heroine who is not nearly as naïve as Catherine, and his close interaction with Elizabeth marks a progression in the sophistication of the Austen villain.

In this, her first completed novel, Austen experiments with characterizations of villains, and John Thorpe is easily comparable with both the bumbling-yet-harmless Collins and the conniving Wickham. He is even comparable with John Willoughby, in the sense that both men embrace the young, reckless, rebel-without-a-cause mentality. Though seemingly stemming from a formal template, Austen’s villains cannot be assumed to develop linearly alongside the publications of her novels. It is, rather, a dialogue between villains, as Austen is known to have revised Northanger Abbey, or Susan, as she originally titled it, both before she sold it to Benjamin Crosby and after it was repurchased from the publisher, giving her years to form and reform the villains of this and other novels.

Austen asks the necessary questions that any fresh author asks, regarding character development in Northanger Abbey, such as “What makes a villain?” “A hero?” “A heroine?” A novel about novels, Northanger Abbey tests characterization on all levels, as it should, being Austen’s earliest completed novel, but Austen really experiments with the idea of a villain in John Thorpe. Thorpe, though socially awkward, over-the-top, and often easy to laugh at, plays the very serious role of menace to Catherine’s happiness, unknowingly almost sabotaging her union with the Tilney family. Thorpe seems to be a middle-ground villain between two of Austen’s most notorious—William Collins and George Wickham. The dialogue between villains is understandable, since Austen had begun both First Impressions and her earlier drafts of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility respectively, at the same time she was finishing her first draft of Northanger Abbey. Collins certainly embodies everything ridiculous, and exaggerates his importance to an extreme like Thorpe, but ultimately is a laughable character with little involvement in Elizabeth Bennet’s happiness. Though he proves an unceasing annoyance, and is also influenced by his own vanity, Collins is a toned-down model of the ridiculous side of Thorpe. For all his apparent enjoyment of the Bennet girls’ disgrace, Collins remains absurd, and less the evil villain, because he shares in their shame, connected to them as their cousin and as the heir to the Longbourn estate. Wickham, on the other hand, is a character Thorpe might have evolved into should he have fully embraced his villainous side. Wickham begins as a character already conniving to obtain his own financial security, though, like Thorpe, his intentions are initially unknown, and he is forever cast as the selfish villain out for his own profit.

John Thorpe acts as Austen’s early hypothesis of sorts, as to what a villain might be in her future novels, though we know that Austen may have adjusted his role as she revised Northanger Abbey in later years. What makes this knowledge all the more intriguing is the fact that Northanger Abbey was published in 1817, after all of Austen’s other novels except Persuasion. Therefore, readers’ perceptions of Thorpe might have been strikingly different than Austen initially intended, since they had already met Wickham, Collins, and Willoughby. The similarities between Thorpe and these men, all of whom are such firmly established characters, are impossible to miss, yet classifying Thorpe in direct line with another is difficult. Having read through Austen’s earlier plot twists, do readers immediately assume Thorpe’s deeper involvement in Catherine’s story, or are we blithely unassuming as we read, and hence deceived even as is Catherine, who has also delved deeply into the world of novels? In either case, from Thorpe, readers learn something of Austen’s early experimentation with characterization and from whom three of her most infamous and memorable characters might have evolved.

Works Cited:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Claire Grogan. Second ed. 1817. Orchard Park, New York: Broadview Press Ltd., 2002.