ABSTRACT
In “Catherine’s Education in Mindreading in Northanger Abbey,” Beth Lau argues that Northanger Abbey features a heroine who is deficient in two important cognitive processes. Catherine Morland initially has a poor Theory of Mind mechanism, or the ability to infer what other people are thinking, feeling, and intending to do. Catherine is especially poor at discerning deceit, insincerity, and attempts to manipulate or take advantage of her, as she has not had much experience with people who engage in such practices before. In the second half of the novel, she also suffers from errors in metarepresentation, which involves evaluating the validity of sources for one’s knowledge of other people and the world. Nonetheless, Catherine does improve in her mindreading skills over the course of the novel, and even from the outset she reveals a promising aptitude for inferring the mental states of those with whom she interacts. In addition, other characters prove to be even more inept in these skills than Catherine, so that she ultimately emerges as one of the most astute mindreaders in the novel. Catherine Morland provides a fascinating study in both the cognitive errors that can hamper one’s ability to accurately infer the mental states of other people and the traits and practices that allow one to become adept in this activity, which Austen like contemporary neuroscientists regards as essential to human social interaction.
