Henry Tilney is probably my favourite of the Austen heroes, actually, but he is a tricky one because a lot of his dialogue is really ambiguous so I think how appealing people find him as a character is very dependent on how they read him.
On the surface, he can come across as very condescending and arrogant, but my interpretation of his character has always been that he is a) incredibly jaded and b) highly ironic, and rarely literally means what he’s saying. One of the key quotes that defines Tilney for me is actually when his sister tells him off:
“You may as well make Miss Morland understand yourself - unless you mean to have her think you intolerably rude to your sister, and a great brute in your opinion of women in general. Miss Morland is not used to your odd ways.”
What this says to me, and how I’ve always read him, is that almost everything he says is sarcastic, satirising ideas about gender and language (tbh I often think Tilney as a character is the closest to being an insert for Austen’s own opinions, his manner reminds me a lot of her letters). This sarcasm is made sharper by the fact that he is, in some ways, a fairly cynical person. I mean, you have consider that Tilney is a man who:
- grew up in the shadow of an authoritarian, domineering father
- lost his mother at 17
- has an older brother that he knows to have committed multiple indiscretions which who knows what consequences
- has watched his sister, who he’s very close to, be isolated and unhappy at home with their father and unable to marry the man she loves
So, personally, I’ve never seen it as him considering himself superior to others, precisely, as it is him having seen a lot of the worst of people and seeing that possibly more easily that he really sees the good in them. Tilney’s educated and has read a lot, and on top of that as a clergyman his work directly involves interacting a lot with other people, and all of that combines to make him probably the most perceptive character in the book. He’s certainly a lot more perceptive than Catherine; in some respects his relationship with Catherine mirrors Knightley’s with Emma, but where Emma is blinded to reality by her own arrogance, Catherine is naive and inexperienced with an overactive imagination.
But Tilney also never treats Catherine with anything other than kindness and consideration - he jokes and teases, but there’s never anything malicious in it and he jokes about himself just as much. He appreciates Catherine’s love of Gothic novels and doesn’t tell her it’s a waste of time but uses it to connect with her further. He doesn’t know about how far Catherine’s imaginings have gone so cheerily jokes around with her about his house being filled with horrors. He doesn’t hold it against her when she apparently breaks her engagement with him to go with the Thorpes, and he doesn’t ridicule or shame her for not seeing the truth about them but admires her optimism and ability to see the best in people.
He also handles the whole debacle at Northanger pretty magnanimously - I mean, Catherine accuses his father of murdering his mother and he would have every right to be furious about it, and could easily have been nasty about it. But he takes it in stride and while he does expresses some disappointment, he gently encourages her to use her common sense and think more rationally.
And that’s because Tilney genuinely delights in Catherine’s optimism and her character. He loves spending time with her and all the individual things that make her her; all he encourages her to do is to mature and think a little more about some times, not to change anything about who she is. I think she helps bring some of that optimism back to him, which is why he’s so willing to cut ties with his father rather than give her up at the end.
As a character, Tilney’s also deliberately subversive for a hero at the time. He enjoys all the same novels as the women, he shops for fabric for his sister’s dresses, his closest friend is his sister. He’s a much more feminine hero than many of the other men in Austen, which is a deliberate choice as he’s a subversion of the “Gothic hero” that was popular at the time and which the book is generally satirising.
There is a level of arrogance of some of what he says and does, yes, but he’s actually a much gentler, softer character than most fictional heroes. A lot of his traits are refracted in Austen’s other men in particular, but none of them have quite the same combination of warmth and humour that Tilney does.
All that said, I think it’s important to remember with any kind of reading of Northanger that it was the first book that Austen wrote and wasn’t published in her lifetime. If she had lived longer, there’s no telling whether it ever would have been or if she would have rewritten/edited it, if we would still have it in the form it’s in. And I think you can definitely see Austen learning as a writer in Northanger and figuring out what makes a hero and a heroine - and then going to deconstruct those ideas further and in a more mature way in her later books.
Also, if you have issues with interpreting Tilney on the page, I’d recommend going to watch the 2007 adaptation of the book. Honestly, God bless whoever decided to cast JJ Feild as Henry Tilney because he’s just perfect and really captures that sense of ironic but warm-hearted humour that to me is what makes the character.
