In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, a pedantic Henry Tilney lectures Catherine Morland on the picturesque. He holds forth in a self-important jargon of “fore-grounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades.” Conferring on the country girl the social polish of good taste in landscape, he places her firmly in a secondary, mediated relation to knowledge. Though she finds it all quite odd at first — “It seemed as if a good view were no longer to be taken from the top of an high hill, and that a clear blue sky was no longer a proof of a fine day” — the infatuated Catherine is content to absorb Henry's opinions; she proves “so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”

Austen embeds her light-hearted satire of the picturesque as pretentious and rigid in a darker view of women's troubled relation to the powerful discourses and institutions of patriarchal culture. Beechen Cliff reminds Catherine of Ann Radcliffe's reams of scenery in The Mysteries of Udolpho; Austen's parody pays ambiguous tribute to Radcliffe, who (I will argue) turns a critique of aesthetics into a sublime nightmare of women's manipulation by a powerful man in control of light and information. The banter among Catherine, Henry, and Eleanor in this scene sketches an analysis of women's systematic exclusion from knowledge as cultural power.