Catherine Morland In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

A heroine usually appears as noble, unswerving and courageous. However, according to Jane Austen’s depiction of young Catherine Morland in the novel Northanger Abbey, a heroine in her infancy can also be mischievous and scatterbrained. Austen’s vivid demonstration of Catherine Morland using a humorous tone conveys an atypical childhood disobeying social expectations for girls and the significance of a good heart that outweighs all the other noteworthy characteristics of women. Austen employs several contrasts between expectation and reality to illustrate how atypical an infant Catherine is. The Morland family, with a father who makes good livings and a mother who is even-tempered, is supposed to raise up children whose propensities …show more content…
In contrast, Catherine is completely different from the expectation as a clergyman’s daughter. Because of her father’s tendency to not “lock up her daughters” like many other fathers who objectify women as only suitable for domestic work and thus the allowance for girls to explore the outside world, little Catherine innately enjoys mostly not the dolls for girls of her age, but boyish activities such as playing cricket. She is supposed to gather roses from the garden because femininity includes the affability of taking care of the garden; but in reality, Catherine picks roses because she is mischievous and she is “always preferring those which she [is] forbidden to take”. Hence, she is not only mischievous and not feminine, but also disobedient to her parents’ commands. Even if her propensities contrasting with her family background show any slight sign of a heroine because of their underlying courage to rebel, the contrast between Catherine’s ineptitude of learning and the expected persistence of a heroine demonstrates that Catherine is a carefree girl who follows her innate propulsions. Rather than being independent and determined, Catherine cannot focus on any learning that her …show more content…
The mention of Richard Morland as a father who does not “lock up his daughters” both satirizes the image of men forbidding women to explore their interests other than domestic performances in a comic tone and implies the social setting in which a “good girl” is supposed to stay at home watering gardens and playing music. When describing Catherine’s ability to learn anything, Austen uses the word “extraordinary” as a verbal irony to suggest her inattentiveness and even stupidity. After all, if one girl spends forever learning how to pronounce “Beggard’s Petition” and is incapable of learning until somebody forces her to ingest the fruitiness of knowledge, her unanticipated ineptitude is indeed absurd. However, Jane Austen does not intend to criticize her unintelligence as she points out that Catherine could learn the fable “The Hare and many Friends” as quickly as any other girl in England. The incongruity in Catherine’s intelligence and Austen’s humorous tone depict that Catherine is drawn to interesting stories rather than writing and French classes. She is drawn to the humorously illustrated “tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinnet” because of childhood curiosity, but she is not

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Catherine Morland In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey