Northanger Abbey

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, the protagonist is a young naïve girl who is not a very good judge of character. She falls in love with a man much older than her, named Henry Tilney. Henry enjoys Catherine’s ignorance and educating her of things she doesn’t know. This essay will examine a passage from volume two, chapter nine wherein Henry finds out Catherine has been accusing his father of murdering his mother. Through the use of satirical tone, the implementation of odd statements, and by a specific structure, Austen displays Henry Tilney’s desire to patronize and educate Catherine and therefore, control their relationship throughout the novel. One unique aspect that Austen incorporates in this passage is adding a…

Catherine Morland is the main character of Jane Austen’s book Northanger Abbey. Catherine is a protagonist, an un-heroic heroine, and the comedic figure of the story. Catherine is not like your typical heroine in a lot of ways. She isn’t smart, wealthy, beautiful, or tragic. Which was what Jane Austen used to break away from gothic novels. Catherine Morland is an un-heroic heroine. She is unfortunate but a very nice and sweet girl whom can be ridiculous at times. She isn’t very experienced…

‘How does Catherine mature over the course of the novel?’ The novel Northanger Abbey – written by Jane Austen in 1817 – tells the story of a young woman who travels to Bath with her wealthy neighbours, and how she grows and matures into adulthood over the course of the book by taking responsibility for her many mistakes and actions. Predominantly, this essay is a tale of one girl’s maturity into a young adult. She makes very many mistakes along the path to growing up, however, she does show…

Wallace’s analysis of Northanger Abbey focuses on the reader’s relationships with the narrator and the author. To highlight this relationship, Wallace chooses to concentrate on the character of Henry Tilney. More specifically, Wallace shows how Henry Tilney’s satire relies on reductive generalizations of other characters, particularly female ones. Wallace then connects this trait of Henry’s to Austen’s tendency to reductively generalize her readers and manipulate her reader into becoming an…

Imagination: It’s All in Your Head In Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland lets her imagination get the best of her in numerous occasions. On some occasions, she struggles with separating the reality of society in Bath from Gothic novels she reads avidly. In others, she is simply naïve to the inner characters of those around her. In both cases, it can be argued that her mental struggles could have ultimately have lead her astray, away from Henry Tilney, and away from Bath,…

The book Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen is more complicated than what can be seen by the naked eye. Each turn that the story takes and each decision the character makes can be seen as a carefully calculated detail taken in part of the writer to prove a point. Each aspect of the story might have been added to make the reader think of what they believe and put it up against what is shown in the book and one of these circumstances happen to be Isabella Thrope and the depiction of her character.…

Austen’s representation of reading epitomises the excesses of the imagination exhibited by gothic readers during the movement of sensibility which effectively led to their disconnection from reality. Austen’s employment of the gothic presents Catherine’s transition from excessive gothic fantasy to reality, which fundamentally enables her to develop independent judgement through her exploration of human experience. Although Austen satirizes the excesses of the gothic through Catherine’s…

“The person, be it a gentleman or a lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”- Jane Austen Northanger Abbey. Growing up around books influenced the way Jane Austen incorporated symbols into her own writings, sometimes even using books to build her characters and themes. Prominently shown through Austen’s Northanger Abbey and seen in her other pieces, she expertly uses engaging realism, subtle irony, and effective parodies of what was going on during her lifetime,…

Jane Austen is known for being a writer of women, and romance, but she is a major influence of gender stereotypes after her time. In many of her works, Austen would flout at how femininity and masculinity were ruled by societal standards. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey follows suit with this concept, by depicting her characters as what was expected of their gender to what was abhorred in upper-middle class and high society. The second to the youngest of eight children, Jane Austen was born on…

A Discussion of the Gothic tradition in the novels “Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen and “The mysteries of Udolpho” by Ann Radcliffe. The genre of Gothic fiction has been a strong writing tradition since its birth in 1764 with the publishing of Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto”. The genre is a mix of both romance and horror with its clearest distinctions being a love of foreign setting and gloomy old buildings, a strong hero, swooning heroine and the constant looming of a monster or…