The Count of Wolfenbach, in contrast, has learned so much from his lifetime of vile actions and the pain they have caused him that he can impart the aphoristic knowledge that “the man conscious of his wickedness, with doubt and terror gnawing at his heart, is the most miserable of human beings.”The Count De Bouville, Matilda’s lover, would seem to have acquired universal knowledge when he reassures Matilda that her status as an orphan does not negate her value: “she who with merit, with good sense, delicacy, and refined sentiments can command respect, is a thousand times superior to those whose inferiority of mind disgraces a rank which the other would ennoble.”However, unlike the other maxims, his sidesteps the relationship of virtue to affliction. He also prefaces his confident statement with “Pardon me, madam . . . if I presume to say you judge erroneously,” undermining his attempt to occupy the role of a teacher of universal truths.In this same conversation between Matilda and Bouville, Matilda reveals her status as a student who is just beginning to understand the wisdom of suffering. She tells him, “[T]o generous spirits like your’s and this family’s, misfortunes are a recommendation to kindness and attention, but with the generality of mankind I have not to learn it must be otherwise.”Matilda acknowledges that suffering should merit sympathy and assistance,grow bags garden as the wise women do, but she focuses more on her own experience with specific altruistic people and the more common indifferent people rather than making an assertion of moral truth.

The situated, particularized nature of this statement combines with the awkward phrasing of “I have not to learn” to highlight the fact that while Matilda has some knowledge and experience, she has more to gain before she can reach a state of objective wisdom.Karen Morton, in her 2011 study on Eliza Parsons, complicates Matilda’s role as a student by alluding to a scene in which the Countess seeks romantic advice from her. Despite the fact that Matilda objects that she is “incompetent to advise,”Morton implies she is in fact qualified to dispense wisdom, and that the Countess recognizes her qualification in the fact that Matilda, too, is a woman who has suffered.However, at this point in her journey, Matilda’s education is still incomplete, and she refuses to counsel her mentor. By the end of the novel, Matilda is able to write to her other former teacher Mother Magdalene, thanking her for her life lessons and aphoristically asserting that “the unfortunate have claims upon the hearts of those whom God has blessed with affluence.”The fact that the style and substance of this statement mirrors the novel’s other statements about suffering shows that Matilda has successfully absorbed the lessons that pain imparts and is now able to disseminate those ideas herself. This letter is the final paragraph of the book, and its placement reinforces the importance in the novel of teaching with stories, learning from misfortune, and responding to suffering in the objectively proper way. Elizabeth Napier writes of this letter and other explicitly moral endings to gothic novels, “The strident tones and crude attempts at emphasis . . . reveal a mingled determination to be explicit about the moral lessons to be gained from such tales of adventure and an uncertainty about the relevance of those ‘lessons’ to the narrative that has produced them.”

While Napier sees the form of expression as evidence that clumsy writers are tacking on unrelated morals, more recent scholars like Morton tend to seek disjunctions between morals and plots as sites of complexity and resistance to social standards. In this case, however, the form of expression itself is part of the message, and it is a message that remains consistent throughout the novel. The school of affliction that the characters teach and learn within trains its students to impose rules and obscure particularity in service of recognizing timeless truths and responding correctly to other sufferers. One way this occurs in practice is that characters’ responses to sad circumstances are often determined not by personal interest and emotion but by a sort of categorical interest that dictates emotional involvement. When Matilda meets the Countess of Wolfenbach for the first time and relates her history as an orphan and the story of her escape from her uncle, she ends the tale by characterizing it as “tedious and little interesting to you.”Her professed certainty that the Countess finds her narrative tiresome may be only politeness, but the confidence of her phrasing introduces the idea that a person can predict whether a story of hardships will involve a listener, even a listener she knows nothing about. The Countess, in turn, furthers this idea by responding, “Dearest madam . . . can you think it possible I should be uninterested for a situation like yours? Young, new to the world, with uncommon attractions, without friends or protectors, surely misfortunes have taken an early hold in your destiny.”She suggests that the combination of Matilda’s personal virtues and difficulties make her automatically worthy of concern. This list of Matilda’s assets and deficits appears to be a description of her “situation,” as if her qualities themselves constitute her circumstances or social position, and it is these status markers that the Countess uses to explain why she has no choice but to become involved.

Her interest is conditional to Matilda’s societal “place” as a lovely young woman in need of help, rather than being the product of any of the details of Matilda’s account. The Countess does not even need to know the specific troubles Matilda faces, because she recognizes Matilda as a member of a category of people who have a claim on the emotional and financial involvement of any sensible person. Beatríz Sánchez Santos touches on the novel’s use of the word uncommon as it appears here, to indicate the fact that certain characters are extraordinary beyond what can be expressed in words alone. In these cases, form substitutes for specificity, as the use of the word uncommon recalls fairy tale conventions of extreme virtue and beauty.The rules of what kind of person or situation requires sympathy and aid are an essential part of the instruction of the school of affliction.Modern readers may find the idea that certain types of people automatically merit sympathy distasteful. Roche’s Clermont, another of the Northanger Horrid Novels, also uses the trope of the “child of sorrow,” which Sadleir describes as an inheritance from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Wertherthat “persists like the Hapsburg nose through the family of Gothic romance.”Neill adds scornfully that all the Horrid Novels that draw on the literature of sensibility contain these “‘children of sorrow,’ whose sufferings make them more ‘interesting’” within the novels but who read as “flat idealized characters” who “totter through the pages of their adventures, fainting, quivering, blushing, dropping tears on their fellow sufferers.”The contempt these critics show for children of sorrow may be a reaction against cliché, or it may be disgust for what would seem to be excessive expressions of emotion by modern literary standards,grow bag for tomato but it may also be an understandable abhorrence for a way of thinking that assumes that certain types of people are inherently deserving of “interest,” or the concern of others. The concept of interest was central to developing ideas about human nature and the treatment of others in the eighteenth century. Philosophers debated the degree to which benevolent actions or sympathetic feelings could be motivated by a concern for one’s own personal benefit , a lack of selfishness , or a regard for societal well-being .Routed through ideas about property ownership, interesting became important in literature of sensibility like Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italyas a word denoting emotional involvement. Unlike the detached, particular interesting that I will examine later, Wolfenbach’s interesting obliges sensible people to involve themselves emotionally and materially in the welfare of strangers in need simply because they represent an abstract virtue or inhabit an identity or situation categorized as worthy of regard. When the most important information a person can seek is an abstraction or category, details are inessential. Parsons describes a world in which a personal experience of affliction provides the wisdom necessary to quickly recognize and correctly respond to the situations of other sufferers. This recognition relies on the reading of visible character in faces, participating in the eighteenth-century belief that countenances reveal people’s true nature. Napier views this feature of Wolfenbach as evidence of its two-dimensional characterization,but what can come across as simplistic writing is a necessary part of the novel’s belief that long experience of suffering provides access to truths that can be recovered instantaneously through abstractions, categories, and sight. Experiential and visual learning are necessary because, according to Wolfenbach, emotions cannot be expressed in words. As Santos points out, this frequent contention of the novel’s can be read in terms of the convention of being overpowered by strong emotion, part of what Clery has described as gothic’s inheritance from stage tragedy.

Distant from these tragic conventions, many readers today may find it frustrating that the novel repeatedly refuses to articulate its characters’ feelings through dialogue, thought, or description of physical sensations, which many other gothic novels employ. While it is unclear whether Parsons’s paucity of emotional description is conventional or merely neglectful, it works as a necessary part of her curriculum, which appears even on the level of grammar in the novel. When Matilda explains to the Countess why she ran away from home, she relates the experience of overhearing her uncle’s plans to rape her in her sleep. Notably, Matilda communicates her situation more than her reaction to the horrifying news: “Overwhelmed by my own reflections, without a friend or habitation to fly to for protection, uncertain whether this man was really my uncle or not, yet convinced he had the most diabolical designs against me, and that in his house I could not be safe: it is impossible to describe my feelings and distress.”In this speech, she focuses on her vulnerable state, which, within Wolfenbach’s emotional curriculum, communicates information that is more important than specific feelings. She may appear only to be listing the aspects of her situation, but the substance and structure of this sentence do much to clarify her feelings in unparticularized terms, the texts of the school of affliction. As a precocious young student, Matilda is already able to parse her experience and communicate her woes as modifiers that accrue and ultimately dangle without attaching to her specifically. She foregrounds the conditions she inhabited: being upended by thoughts; being without allies, shelter, or defense; and lacking important knowledge while seeming to possess knowledge of her future harm that is nevertheless in the tentative realm of intentions. These conditions suggest her emotional state indirectly, and even grammatically, as they are modifiers that modify nothing, preceding not an expected final “I” statement but rather breaking off in a colon followed by the objective “it.” Her general circumstances must stand in for the particular misery she is unable to express. The categories of roles and situations are the main tools for expressing feelings in this passage, aside from the suggestive power of the repeated insistence that these feelings cannot be described. Matilda becomes “a child,” and the Countess Berniti becomes “a mother” and “the unhappy widow, the childless parent.” Even the situations themselves are abstracted. Parsons emphasizes the universal over the specific by using infinitives that rise above the conjugated, particularized situation. Similarly, the faltering, ecstatic sentence fragments, which express narrative emotion syntactically when words fail, focus attention on the nouns and away from pronouns. This differs significantly from today’s grammar of emotion, which identifies a feeler with a feeling or otherwise attaches the two . While these modern examples might appear to elevate the feeling just as much, they syntactically prioritize the pronoun, the person. The sentence with the clearest possessive in this passage, the one that ponders “the feelings of Matilda,” syntactically prioritizes the emotions over the person, generalizes those emotions as the broad category of “feelings,” and even declines to speculate about what they might be. Even so, the situations in this passage do not subsume Matilda grammatically in the same way as the previous example. Strangely, the version of this passage in the 2007 edition of the novel omits a comma that the 1793 edition includes, so that the recent edition reads, “What then must be the feelings of Matilda after suffering such a variety of sorrows.”