Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen's Satire Novel

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey successfully satirizes English literature of the time Austen wrote it. The "Preface" to the 1922 edition dates the composition of the novel in 1798. A Bath publisher purchased the manuscript for ten pounds and sat on the book for ten years. After Austen achieved some success, her brother bought it back for the original purchase price of ten pounds. John Murray finally published the novel in 1817.

The "heroine" of Northanger Abbey is Catherine Morland, a middle class girl. Austen's narrator uses the term "heroine" somewhat mockingly in the opening chapters as she characterizes Catherine as "plain." As a student, Catherine is "not remarkable" who "shirked her lessons." Even those of us who consider ourselves the most serious students today have displayed traces of laziness in our past studies. Certainly we would never display such characteristics in the present. Eventually Catherine grows into an "almost pretty girl," although her behavior is more tomboyish then ladylike.

What are the reasons for the defects in Catherine's character? Should we even label her qualities as defects? For certain segments of English society, right conduct, particularly along gender lines was an important virtue. First, note that Catherine is one of ten Morland children. The youngest children take up most of Mrs. Morland's time, so Catherine has significant unsupervised time. Not until Catherine finds herself in the truly threatening world of Bath does the reader learn of her avid reading of Gothic novels. Catherine talks with various characters about her enjoyment of Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Unfortunately, Catherine's reading habits do not serve her well in Bath. Her ignorance of social conventions nearly leads her to ruin her reputation when she rides alone with John Thorpe in his carriage. The carriage was the frequent setting for sexual assault in English literature. One need only to look as far as Emma, another Austen novel, for an example. On a carriage ride, Mr. Elton "violenty" makes love to Emma. While Austen probably did not mean to portray an actual rape of Emma Woodhouse, such an incident could ruin her.

The site for mystery and danger to Catherine is Northanger Abbey, the home of the Tilney family. Henry Tilney, Catherine's romantic interest and fellow lover of Gothic novels, constructs a fantastic story about hidden doors and an entrapped women that launches Catherine's imagination into overdrive. In Catherine's pursuit of a real life Gothic narrative, she humiliates herself before Henry. While Austen pokes fun at Catherine, she employs the conventions of the Gothic novel. The thunderstorms, the dead wife, and the locked doors in the massive abbey set the tone that leads the reader to briefly wonder whether General Tilney actually might have murdered his wife.

As in Emma, Austen fails to take herself so seriously. The plot primarily focuses on men and women attempting to win each over other, with extreme naïveté producing comic results. In Austen's defense of the novel, she lampoons the English culture that highly regards the "improbable" circumstances of Histories of England. A novel is a layer of contrivances, but I hardly consider Austen's characters "unnatural" or her language "so coarse as to give no very favorable idea of the age that could endure in it." Ultimately, I must leave the question of whether Austen is wholly in earnest up to the reader.

Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Emma. Project Gutenberg: 2008. 6 Sept. 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/158/158-h/158-h.htm

--. Northanger Abbey. NY: E. P. Dutton, 1922.