Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey ([1818]2003, hereto referred to by page number) was written during the time of the French Revolution and this political upheaval initiated intellectual writers to rethink ‘things as they…[were]…and things as they should be’ (Realisms,p.40). The extract provided follows on from numerous accounts of Catherine’s social blunders and misinterpretation of events for which her reading of Gothic novels has influenced her outlook. It also follows on from Henry’s rebuttal of her fanciful imagination which arguably has an impact on her conduct within the extract provided. With this in mind, it is significant to note that the early nineteenth-century also marked the emergence of a polemical debate about the nature of fiction, …show more content…
However, Catherine dismisses this as a ‘raised imagination’ (p.164), suggesting that her perceived naivety in Volume I, in which she was influenced by Gothic novels and mocked for it, was justified as it anticipated the real life Gothic pervading the domestic sphere. Furthermore, Catherine’s distress is at the General’s ‘unlooked for return’ is portrayed through focalisation as her ‘heart sink[s]’ . This personification echoes Henry’s earlier parody of the Gothic in which he questions Catherine ‘[w]ill not your heart sink within you?’ (pp.114-115). The mimicking of these earlier words implies that, as Watson notes, Catherine finally casts aside her ‘imaginative vagaries’ in order to become ‘marriageable’ (Realisms,p.95). However, Watson fails to explore the way in which this is at the expense of Catherine’s individuality. To expand, the echoing of Henry’s words during, what is arguably, the first scene which is truly akin to Radcliffean Gothic subtly informs the reader that Catherine has become the ‘powerless heroine’ in the face of a tyrannical male figure (Realisms,p.71). Moreover, this passage conforms to the episodic nature of the novel in the sense that Catherine continuously misreads events, but the irony is that this passage reverses the novel’s patterning technique. Instead of misreading …show more content…
Tilney, ‘Catherine's blood ran cold with the horrid suggestions which naturally sprang from these words’ (p.137). This serves to highlight Catherine’s development from socially unacceptable behaviour to conventional female propriety, yet, it also suggests she has been conditioned into silent passivity. In addition, the didactic narrative voice that has provided reportage throughout the novel is almost entirely absent in this scene. Instead, Austen employs free indirect speech to show rather than tell the reader about Catherine’s inner turmoil as she reflects how she has been ‘[t]urned from the house…by such a man as General Tilney, so polite, so well bred, and heretofore so particularly fond of her!’ This free indirect speech distances the narrator from the character and enables the reader to discern their own judgement on the outcome of Catherine’s transformation and, in turn, causes them to question the connection between their own lives and the seemingly fictive Gothic pervading the domestic

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