This article comes directly from content in the video series The Life and Works of Jane Austen. The couple’s obstacle to love proves to be not a villainous criminal, or a supernatural force, as you’d expect to see in a Gothic romance, but instead proves to be the hero’s brash, materialistic father, General Tilney. The first young man whom Catherine meets does turn out to be her hero: the witty, sarcastic, and novel-loving Henry Tilney. It’s a formula we might even call half-Gothic or ‘Gothic light’. The reason Northanger Abbey isn’t only a gothic parody is because its story employs many Gothic elements, in a new key. In a Gothic novel, just as the first young female a heroine meets might become her best friend and sidekick, the first eligible young man she meets might become her future husband, after they overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As a result, Catherine consistently misreads the motivations of her fast friend, Isabella Thorpe, who turns out to be a very false friend. That’s precisely what would happen in a typical Gothic novel. When Catherine meets a young woman just her age on her first trip to Bath, she believes that the two of them must immediately become each other’s trusted confidantes.
Her father isn’t what Northanger Abbey mockingly calls ‘addicted to locking up his daughters’. Moreover, in a Gothic novel, the heroine would often be made into an immediate object of pity. Also, unlike most heroines in Gothic novels-stunningly beautiful, virtuous, dutiful, accomplished, and modest-Catherine is nothing special to look at. But Austen’s Catherine is not a damsel in distress. Many heroines in Gothic novels were orphans. Northanger Abbey begins by introducing the heroine Catherine she’s unusual in having both a father and a mother.
(Image: BongkarnGraphic/Shutterstock) Catherine: A Gothic Heroine? It is an amalgamation of gothic and parody. Northnager Abbey cannot be restricted within the genre of the gothic. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a gothic parody, a comic send-up of the suspense-filled works of Gothic fiction in vogue in the politically volatile 1790s. These were the building blocks of the Gothic fiction that was immensely popular in the late 18th century. Heroes, villains, and damsels in distress.
By Devoney Looser, Arizona State University Ancient castles, ghostly sounds, and dark and stormy nights.
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