How to Create a Comic Character: Featuring Jane Austen's Catherine Morland
In order to create a memorable comic character like Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, a simple comic principle must be put in play.
How does one of the greatest comic novelists of all time create a comic character?
Before we get to Jane Austen, we need to consider first what it means to write comic fiction.
Comic Fiction: A Loving Resolution at the End of All Things
“I found that the novel enabled me to express the comic side of my mind and at the same time work out some serious theme.”
Muriel Spark, “How I Became a Novelist,” in The Informed Air: Essays
Muriel Spark’s observation captures what it is I most admire in her writing: the mixture of comedy and, if not tragedy, at least some serious theme. I am reminded of what Socrates argues at the end of Plato’s Symposium, that the best writer is able to write both tragedy and comedy. Is it possible to do both at the same time?
I am reminded also of what Walker Percy says in one of his essays. He is talking about the predicament of the contemporary Catholic novelist in the American South, but what he says here I believe is applicable more broadly:
“So what should he [the novelist] do? His natural mission in this place and in these times is, if not search and destroy, then probe and challenge. His greatest service is to attack, that is to say, satirize. Don’t forget that satire is not primarily destructive. It attacks one thing in order to affirm another. It assaults the fake and the phony in the name of truth. It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. Satire is always launched in the mode of hope”
Walker Percy, “How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” in Signposts in a Strange Land
Such hope and affirmation are fruits of the comic mind: the mind that knows that, despite all the fakery and phoniness and destructive inhumanity, there is an unexpected and loving resolution at the end of all things.
The Comic Character: A Clash of Realities
One of my favorite books on writing is John Vorhaus’ The Comic Toolbox, a book I recommend to anyone wishing to write (or perform) in the comic mode.
Vorhaus captures the principle involved in writing a comic character with remarkable simplicity.
A comic character plays on the tension between “real reality,” how things actually are, and the comic character’s “fantasy reality.”
You can see that principle in play in Walker Percy’s description of satire. The “fake and the phony” (fantasy reality) is put in tension with the “truth” (real reality). The “inhuman” is ridiculed in order to affirm the “human.”
So, when Lucy dreams of being the star of Ricky’s show, her fantasy reality (being the star) clashes with real reality (she doesn’t have the talent for it).
That clash, that tension, that very human lack of humility, is what makes us laugh.
Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland
Catherine Morland, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s least best but still wonderful Northanger Abbey, is a comic novel that pictures the significant role played by the imagination in moral formation.
At the beginning of the tale, Catherine Morland’s imagination is immersed—not to say “pickled”—in novels.
Northanger Abbey shows us the adventure of a young woman being misled by the “reflux” of certain literary romances and Gothic novels.
The philosopher Robert Sokolowski says:
“pictures can mislead and submerge reality just as much as they can enrich life. “We might begin to live in mere picturing, in movies or novels, for example, or in television” (Phenomenology of the Human Person, 139).
This is the situation—the comic situation—of Catherine Morland. She is living in pictures that submerge reality.
Her fantasy reality is that she is a heroine in a Gothic novel:
“But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine” (Northanger Abbey, Penguin Classics edition, Volume I, Chapter 1, p. 17).
Like Lucy, Catherine wants to be “in the show.” She wants to live the kind of life that the heroines live in the kind of novel she devours.
But her real reality tells a very different story:
“She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features;--so much for her person;--and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind” (Northanger Abbey, Penguin Classics edition, Volume I, Chapter 1, p. 16).
In these opening pages of Austen’s novel, the comic mechanism of Catherine Morland’s character is made clear: her fantasy reality is in tension with her real reality. And from that fundamental principle springs all the comic action and irony in Northanger Abbey.
Yet the novel doesn’t just leave Catherine in her unheroic existence. With the help of a romantic interest, Henry Tilney, it shows her a way out of the tension toward the loving resolution characteristic of comedy. The real reality that has been submerged for so long by Catherine’s imagination finally breaks through her bubble of fantasy.
Speaking of Favorite Books on Writing
Here are my top picks, lightly annotates.
Aristotle, Poetics
The first principles of storytelling briefly and sometimes cryptically stated.
Linda Seger, Making a Good Script Great
I discovered this book some years ago now in a public library in Houston, Texas. Broke open for me the whole idea of story structure: inciting incidents, turning points, etc. Not just for screenwriters.
Robert McKee, Story
It’s big. It’s theoretical. It repays attention a hundred-fold. Read Seger first then let McKee take you even deeper into what makes a story work. If I could keep only one writing book on my shelf, it would be this one. Not just for screenwriters.
Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer
A book about what the title says. Invaluable advice on how to focus the mind for writing fiction.
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
Wit and wisdom from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
Viki King, How to Write a Movie in 21 Days
Think the title sounds cheesy? I followed the program and produced a script, my very first, which got me a reputable agent in LA. A great resource for the overly analytical.
John Vorhaus, The Comic Toolbox
Taught me the principles of comedy. If we can’t have Aristotle’s lost book on comedy, at least we have Vorhaus.
Stephen King, On Writing
I’ve never read a Stephen King novel but I’m greatly in his debt for this book.
David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla
In this book Mamet reveals the Long Lost Secret of the Incas. Learn it. Memorize it. See also Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife, On Directing Film, and Theatre, all of which are replete with great insights for writers.
What did I miss? What favorites would you like to share?