Northanger Abbey - What are the novelistic conventions at which Austen pokes fun; how she gets her comic effects at the level of the individual sentence, and how this passage relates to the rest of the novel.

Authors Avatar

Dan Coughlan T6010839        AA316 The Nineteenth-Century Novel       TMA 01   Question 1

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Close textual analysis based on volume 2, chapter 6, from 'The night was stormy …' to the end of the chapter ('… she unknowingly fell fast asleep.').

What are the novelistic conventions at which Austen pokes fun; how she gets her comic effects at the level of the individual sentence, and how this passage relates to the rest of the novel.

*****

In Northanger Abbey, Austen pokes gentle fun at the Gothic genre and its readers, who would have had their own expectations of Northanger, stemming from the Gothic. Initially, the reader doesn't know quite where to find him or herself. On the one hand we know that Catherine is a silly girl, but we are drawn in by the language of the text. The feel is at once veritably Gothic but also comic. We laugh at Catherine because not to do so would be to admit that we are like her - wanting her to find something even though we know she will not.

As a heroine, Catherine is somewhat lacking in the typical physical traits and practical and mental abilities. However, she does have many of the emotional attributes of a classic Gothic heroine - she is sensitive and thoughtful and she has aspirations - but all these qualities are satirised by Austen. Catherine's interpretation of events and situations is elevated beyond normal, sensible intuition. The roll of paper at the back of the cabinet, so clearly mislaid and left in haste (at least, this is clear in retrospect), to her is placed there 'apparently for concealment'. 'her feelings at that moment were indescribable.' but Austen goes straight on to describe how Catherine feels. We know though, that her 'anxious acuteness' is not as a result of being truly scared; rather because she is truly dismayed at not actually finding something to scare her.

Join now!

Austen makes good use of 'free indirect discourse', allowing the narratorial voice to slip in and out of Catherine's consciousness. She accedes that she is in an Abbey, the epitome of the Gothic and everything she loves, but tries to convince herself that she is happy at having nothing to fear. Almost as if she is aware of the obvious silliness in the way she impresses a fictional template on the world around her, Catherine's own voice again enters the narrative, justifying her actions in her hope at finding something terrible in the cabinet - she 'never … had ...

This is a preview of the whole essay