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Northanger Abbey as a complex
parody of the Gothic genre
ART 1: Female Gothic Reconfigurations, Davison

ART 2: Comedy in ‘Northanger Abbey’, Gallon

ART 3: The Reflexive Function of Parody, Hannoosh

ART 4: Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception: Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise, Miller

ART 5: Enclosed in Openness: Northanger Abbey and the Domestic Carceral, Morrison

ART 6: Gothic Parody, Neill

ART 7: Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody, Wallace

ART 8: The Byronic in Jane Austen's "Persuasion" and "Pride and Prejudice”, Wootton

ART 9: The Function of Parody in Northanger Abbey, Zimmerman

ART 10: From Sublime Abbey to Picturesque Parsonage: The Aesthetics of Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of
Udolpho, Lenckos

ART 11: “Let me go, Mr
...
For others, Northanger Abbey is ‘perhaps the most political of Jane Austen’s novels’,111 a
work that equally praises and ridicules the Gothic
...
” p159

"Northanger Abbey is a quintessential 1818 production, according to several critics, in that it uniquely
combines ‘gentle parody’113 and political critique
...
” p162

"Recent scholars have under- scored ‘Catherine’s intuitive perception of General Tilney as a Gothic villain
[as being] to some extent justified by the cruelty of his subsequent behaviour towards her’
...
” p162

"Austen’s strategies with this relevant and versatile form resolve the novel’s debate over reading the
Gothic
...
Those who read it entirely literally, like
Catherine, are misreading it, while those like Henry Tilney who deny its relationship to reality are missing the
point
...
Much in the way that the Gothic has been positively reassessed by critics in recent years, Austen
suggests that it encodes deep-seated, some- times dark truths
...
No character better illustrates the
case than the portionless girl
...
” p113

“Rose, for example, argues that parody possesses a self-reflexive aspect because of the dual function of
the parodist as reader (of the parodied work) and author (of the parody): in presenting the parodist's critical
interpretation of his reading, it gives us a model by which to interpret itself
...
(81)” p115

"The same reflexive technique, likening the parody to the parodied work, is used by Jane Austen in
Northanger Abbey, again through a convention of the genre parodied: the famous defense of writing and
reading novels that the author addresses to the reader in Chapter 5 actually offers her own novel as the
subject of a later work
...
'" Catherine fails to perceive
the humor until Henry, unable to contain his laughter, leaves it to her to imagine the rest of the story, and
thus brings her back to reality
...
” p119

"The most effective criticism of the gothic nove l, in other words, consists not in ignoring it or hypocritically
malignin ing or repudiating it, as do other novelists, but in parodying it, revising and reusing it comically in
one's own work, as Henry does in Chapt er 20, and Austen does in Northanger Abbey
...
It criticizes, but does not have the hypocrisy of those who degrade "by
their contemptuous  censure the very performances, to the number of which th ey are themselves adding
...
” p120

ART 6: "The most famous Gothic parody, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, is really a parody of Gothic parodies
...
” p199

"Northanger Abbey adopts Gothic tropes yet ultimately asserts its own realism
...
In doing so, she legitimises Gothic literature and
suggests new directions for the genre
...
In working toward her own concept of what constitutes novelistic
discourse, Austen makes the reader a participant, now perhaps colluding with, now perhaps resisting the
narrator's evaluation of her own novel
...

Austen begins by allowing the reader to feel that Henry speaks for her
...
” p263

“Whether the reader chooses to endorse one view or to suspend judgement, he is still, left with an
incomplete reading of the text
...
149)
...
You have no doubt of the mutual attachment of your brother and your
friend; depend upon it therefore, that real jealousy never can exist between them; depend upon it that no
disagreement between them can be of any duration
...
152) "

The absolute, authoritative language of this speech ("you have no doubt," "depend upon it," "you may be
certain") is wholly at odds with both the truth of the matter as we perceive it and Henry's expressed urging,
"let us all guess for ourselves
...
151-52)


Yet against all her own instincts, Catherine is convinced; his speech "carried her captive" because "Henry
Tilney must know best" (p
...
The language of struggle and capitulation here demonstrates what the
authoritative narrator can do to an insecure reader, who may "contend" and "resist" but is eventually made
captive to the narrator's will
...

Isabella's character, and Henry's real opinion of it, will come out, and only a reader as enthralled as
Catherine herself will fail to question Tilney's earlier rhetoric of comfort
...
Each stance is trapped within
its own self-created limitations
...
160), Austen asks the
reader to provide part of the story
...
247)
...
If the
narrator disclaims the responsibility for shaping the reader's view of the world, of books, or even of this
book, the reader must assume the burden of making meaning in the text
...
” p271

ART 8: "Her expose of the more ludicrous aspects of the Gothi a good-natured, 'cheerful intertextuality'
which, like most parodies, affirms a respect for the original subject (significantly, Henry Tilney reads
Radcliffe’s novels whereas John Thorpe does not)
...
' A slanted reading of the Gothic villain in Northanger Abbey
simultaneously conveys humour and serious political connotations, therby conflating both fantasy and
realistic anxieties
...
[…] For Austen, satire was the sincerest form of flattery'; irony, in her letters as well as her
fiction, is directed at what Austen admired and, more imp ortantly, what she found intellectually engaging
...
” p55

“Henry Tileny was introduced to Catherine by the master of ceremonies in the Lower Rooms (p
...
The
parody arouses a conventional interest that is then satisfied in an unexpected way
...
To control the reader’s responses to novels, to make him discriminate finely, Jane Austen
includes direct comment on
...
” p58

"But also consistent with the structure of the book is the Gothic real- ity of her Northanger experience
...
ts continuance; but
all was silent
...
She trembled a little at the idea of
any one’s approaching so cautiously; but resolving not to be again overcome by trivial appearances of
alarm, or misled by a raised imagination, she stepped quietly forward, and opened the door
...
Catherine’s spirits however were tranquillized but for an instant, for Eleanor’s
cheeks were pale, and her manner greatly agiltated
...
222-23)"” p60-61

"The early part of the Northanger episode is a trivial, although amusing, reworking of the quixotic pattern
because it touches Catherine’s emo- tions in only a superficial way
...
227)
...
T h e reader is

trained by Jane Austen’s rhetoric to penetrate to what is important in Gothic and sentimental patterns-the
human nature that is represented in them
...
As a
child of the Enlightenment, Austen naturally eschewed the practice of disclosing the mystery at the heart of
the story of self-realization as supernatural
...
” p106-7

"Radcliffe’s books, on the whole, bridge the gap between the “traditional” gothic, which maintains the
inscrutability of the occult mystery at the center of its plot, and an “enlightened” gothic, which in- sists on a
logical elucidation of such a phenomenon
...
2 Radcliffe and Austen also share
a proto-Romantic belief in the importance of a “natural” education: a child’s experience of the sublime and
beautiful aspects of the countryside serves to elevate and inspire its mind to thought and creativity
...

However, Austen’s understatement should not come as a surprise since, from the beginning, the tone of the
novel inti- mates that its author does not wish to stun readers with the same grand utopian resolutions as
Radcliffe
...
” p109

ART 11: "However, much of Austen’s parody, and the social commentary it veils, is subversive and can only
be seen after several readings, for Austen de- lights in tricking her readers as much as she does
Catherine
...
In fact, Henry seems much like his creator
...
” p70-1

"Although Northanger Abbey is a satire of the gothic novel, it is also much more than that — a love story, a
novel of manners, a female bil- dungsroman
...
Catherine seems destined for a companionate marriage, the marriage model desired by the female gothic heroine
...
Instead, she “triumphs over male authoritarianism” and achieves a union
“where womanly virtue and patriarchal authority are no longer in conflict” by marriage to a true hero, one
who is both manly and virtuous
...
He just has a little fun before he does it
...
She misreads the exact nature of his crime, but she is right
to be suspicious about his charm- ing and approving social façade
...
By contrast, Henry has a more superficial experience of Udolpho
...
g
...
Instead harmless
...
Taken together, all three mark a revolution in the Female Gothic form and illustrate its
tremen- dous versatility
...
” p145

"In both its choice of naive female protagonist and its basic skeletal plot, Northanger Abbey is a novel in the
tradition of Radcliffean Female Gothic
...
” p160

"Austen intimates that there is something Gothic in the everyday… she defuses and modernizes the Gothic
by simultaneously bringing it down to earth and up to date” p161-2

"In terms of the Female Gothic, Northanger Abbey is akin to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria in that Austen
brings the Gothic home, refusing to displace her critique of patriarchy on to foreign domains
...
Writing from a feminist angle, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
have called attention to his arbitrary authority and treacherous ability to trap Catherine ‘inside his fiction, a
tale in which she figures as an heiress and thus a suitable bride for his second son’
...
She likewise displaces her fears regarding her
potential marriage to Henry Tilney on to his father, whose greed and coercion are ulti- mately made known
to her
...
” p163


"In the unremittingly economic Female Gothic,139 the Gothic is shown to reside in the everyday in the form
of women’s commodification
...
142 Bringing Radcliffe’s Mysteries to bear on
Northanger Abbey, it could be said that what is ultimately behind Austen’s novel’s figurative black veil are
stark, ugly truths regarding money and class and gender politics in Catherine Morland’s society
...
” p164

ART 4: “In a similar vein, Claudia Johnson observes that Northanger Abbey is “an alarming novel to the
extent that it, in its own unassuming and matter- of-fact way, domesticates the gothic and brings its
apparent excesses into the drawing rooms of ‘the midland countries of England
...
That cause, in Johnson’s reading, lies in the arbitrary
power of paternal figures like General Tilney
...
Remember that we are English, that we are
Christians… Could they be be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this…” NA

“…the exhortation to remember the country and age in which she lives reminds us that gothic atrocities
conventionally occur in another country and time; the exhortation to remember that she is Christian (read:
Protestant) reminds us that the gothic is conventionally associated with a deviant Catholicism
...
Radcliffe’s “charming” works]
...
” p8

“Gothic atrocities, which characteristically involve the withdrawal of a female subject from visibility, cannot
be perpetrated “in a country like this
...
The point here is not simply that General Tilney
recovers romance villainy in the realm of manners; rather, the realm of manners, the domestic parlor,
reinscribes gothic incarcera- tion in and as a generalized economy of surveillance
...
Tilney culminates in the discovery
of the famous “inventory of linen,” the most mundane and domestic of all possible “texts
...
” p12

"Catherine assumes that the chest that contains the inventory is locked
...
And therein lies the principle of her claustration: not in an
economy of gothic secrecy, but in a domestic sphere, at once social and psychological, in which there are
no secret spaces, in which there is no escape from an openness that encloses
...
” p21

ART 6: "A later scene in which General Tilney casts Catherine from the Abbey seems to confirm his villainy
and validate Catherine’s Gothic imaginings
...

Austen is certainly satirising the didacticism of other Gothic Quixote tales when her narrator draws the story
to a close by inviting readers to determine for themselves ‘the tendency of this work’ (Austen 2002:
240)
...
Moreover, his tyranny extends beyond the immediate family sphere; as Marilyn Butler has
argued, General Tilney is the 'unacceptable face of contemporary capitalism’, concerned only with social
advancement, 'improving' his estate through landscaping, and defending national security
...
Its purpose is to underscore the realistic, but seemingly innocuous,
dangers and misfortunes that beset Catherine and Eleanor
...
” p92

"As McMaster notes, Catherine is even uncertain if it is permissible for her to laugh at Henry Tilney’s
imitation of an affected dandy (214)
...
Aubert
...
For Catherine
indulges in wild speculation at a time when she is effectively outside parental or paternal control, when she
is in essence nobody's daughter, and when she is not yet effectively under Henry's control, when she is in
fact nobody's wife
...
"What have you been judging from?" asks Henry, the answer to which
is not only The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Romance of the Forest, those narratives of other times and
places, but from a female sensibility that is itself ap- parently incapable of judging properly
...
” p3

ART 9: "In general, these chapters are a catalogue of how Catherine differs from the heroine, but buried in
the opening chapter is the understated comment: “with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old,
she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper
...
14)
...
(p
...
She is frequently contrasted
with the sentimental heroine so that the rationality of her responses may be set against the excesses of the
heroine’s behavior
...
53)
...
When Henry Tilney visits
Catherine’s box at the theater, “it was agreed that the projected walk should be taken as soon as possible;
and, setting aside the misery of his quitting their box, she was, upon the whole, left one of the happiest
creatures in the world” (p
...
Catherine’s feelings are here described in the extravagant terms appropriate
to a heroine like Evelina, who, when de- serted in the theater by Lord Orville, is left to face the contempt of
her relatives and the schemes of her would-be seducers
...
” p58

"The reader implied is appropriate and consistent
...
She is both a static heroine who
steadfastly maintains the integrity of her own feelings and a developing character who is enlightened about
the ways in which others use conventional outward expressions of feeling for unfeeling purposes
...
” p62

"In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen disentangles true from false sensibility, and in doing so she both appeals
to the interest in sentimental fiction and expresses contempt for the perversions of sen- timental values in
life and literature
...
They struggle to exemplify values that their societies no longer
wholeheartedly endorse, and they must fight a rear- guard action to preserve these values
...
” p63

ART 10: "As the narrative of Northanger Abbey progresses, the text abounds more and more with the
beautiful and sublime language of sensibility reminiscent of The Mysteries of Udolpho
...
At the same time, the
depictions of Catherine’s corresponding shifts in emotion, her anxieties, desires, and reflections, also begin
to build in inten- sity and frequency
...

Thus, Northanger Abbey gently hints that while Austen’s England does not offer the same unlimited scope
for adventure as does Mrs
...
In both locales, a “heroine” may grow from a doubting, inexperienced girl
into a more knowing, assured young woman
...
Aubert’s world, Catherine’s sphere
is small, and the edifices she visits are unimpressive
...
Aubert
...
” p94

"Because she doesn’t recognize when she’s in a domestic gothic crisis, her responses are swift and
effective, unlike those of gothic heroines, who are often hyper-aware of the people and forces that threaten
them
...
” p94


"Significantly, Catherine’s ignorance of the danger she is in helps rather than hinders her
...
She may be physically in John’s power, but she comes into her own psy- chological
agency as the drive progresses
...

She listened reluctantly, and her replies were short” (88)
...
By refusing to be pleasant to John or
to let him get away with maligning James, Catherine is asserting her opinions and her independence,
unconsciously readying herself for John’s next attempt to restrain her, when he and Isabella try to get her to
break her renewed engage- ment with Eleanor in order to go on another drive
...
” p97

"Significantly, Catherine’s breaking away from her physical imprison- ment coincides with her repeated
assertion of her will; she now allows neither her body nor her mind to be shackled
...
Aubert frequently does, thus al- lowing
herself to be imprisoned more securely
...
She is “fearful of being pursued” after she
escapes, but her “determin[ation]” outweighs her fear (101)
...
Though Catherine experiences anger, resentment, and
misery, she never feels frightened
...
The young woman who
does behave with excessive sensibility during this episode is Eleanor, and the scene in which she tells
Catherine of the General’s orders is written in high, rather than parodic, gothic style
...
Again, when Catherine is finally in a “fullblown Gothic” situation, she resists the urge to dramatize or even recognize it
...
The General’s
abuse of Catherine and Eleanor’s unwilling part in it are catalysts for Eleanor’s anger at the General’s
constant abuse of her
...
” p100

“Her search for ostentatious gothic elements at Northanger, especially her be- lief that General Tilney has
murdered his wife, blinds her to the General’s real gothic crime of abusing his daughter
...
Eleanor cannot receive Catherine when the
latter calls to apologize for the botched country walk, as the General and she “‘were just preparing to walk
out, and he,
...
The General frequently
calls her away from amusements to answer notes: two instances are when Henry is reading Udolpho to her
(107) and when she is about to show Catherine her mother’s bedroom (191-92); he often shouts at her; and
he censors her letters (228)
...
Henry and Frederick are also
subdued, but they can escape him more easily
...
”p100

"Eleanor’s frequent isolation from other women of her class—a typical trial of gothic heroines but atypical
for Regency ones — speaks to the General’s obsessive behavior towards his daughter
...
was uncomfortably circum- stanced
—she had no female companion” (157)
...
Northanger
...
I know no one more entitled, by unpretending merit, or better prepared by habitual

suffering, to receive and enjoy felicity” (250-51)
...
For all her education, intelligence, and awareness of her bleak situation,
Eleanor’s “real power” to escape “is nothing
...
It is Catherine’s subconscious refusal to be helpless and passive that
makes her powerful; she is not bound by “‘tiresome’” history, with its “‘men all so good for nothing, and
hardly any women’” (108)
...
” p103

ART 12: "He is, in fact, Austen’s “feminized hero
...
The actual feminized heroes of the female gothic novel are men of sentiment
...
These behaviors are associated with the cult of sensibility, a movement that many Britons
believed had “feminized the nation, given women undue prominence, and emasculated men” (Todd 133)
...
Austen, in some of
her novels, points out traces of effeminacy in male characters such as Frank Churchill and Robert Ferrars,
always with disap- proval
...
” p70

"Henry’s attempt to untangle the confusion between Catherine and Eleanor takes a humorous but
misogynistic turn: “‘I have no patience with such of my sex as disdain to let themselves sometimes down to
the comprehension of yours
...
Perhaps they may want observa- tion, discernment, judgment, fire, genius, and wit,’” Henry
declares
...
’” When Eleanor demands that he recant and reassure Catherine that
he is not “‘a great brute in [his] opinion of women,’” he replies, “‘Miss Morland, no one can think more
highly of the understanding of women than I do
...
’” Eleanor, defeated, assures her friend that Henry “‘must be
entirely misunder- stood, if he can ever appear to say an unjust thing of any woman at all, or an unkind one
of me’” (113-14), and, in fact, his own words and actions prove this to be true
...

When he is serious, however, Henry is never misogynistic—in fact, he takes pains to “ungender” things…
when the conversation turns sober he reveals, “‘I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women
write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes
...
And later when
Catherine as- serts that novels “‘are not clever enough for’” him, he replies, “‘The person, be it gentleman
or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid’” (106)
...
” p74-5

"Henry has his own home, and the atmosphere around the General is hardly congenial, so it is doubtful that
Henry would choose to spend as much time at the Abbey as he does if it were not for his love of
Eleanor
...
In this instance, he even uses his wit to comfort her: “‘You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you
lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can oc- cupy
...
You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world
...
You feel all this?’” (207)
...
” p75-6

ART 13: "The power of Catherine’s speech manifests itself not only in her abil- ity to speak her thoughts
and feelings directly
...
” p41


“Catherine Morland is not like the beautiful orphan heiresses of gothic or sentimental fiction; she is an
ordinary young woman who lives with both of her fairly sen- sible parents and the rest of her large,
affectionate family
...
She also acquires little of the range of the prescribed “feminine” ac- complishments of
languages and the fine arts
...
What might sound like overstatement is simply true in Catherine’s case
...
She is a woman who is open
with her affections, and when she likes a person, she shows her feelings
...
Rather than
following an artificial script, Cath- erine prefers bluntness and directness to elegance
...
” p145

ART 5: "But what Henry does not realize, although it is implicit in the fact that he is the source of the
rebuke, is that Catherine's surmises do conform to at least one of the requirements of the legitimately
gothic, which is the temporary absence of an authorized male presence or aesthetic principle
...
And as her specula- tions are in error, gothic surmises, Catherine's "dreadful" ideas, are
associated with but a negative order of freedom, a respite from male stan- dards of probability and
propriety to which she will yet revert
...
Yet it is
precisely these other narratives, or these narratives of other times and places, that identify the gothic as an
excess of female sensibility and that are therefore implicit in the very rebuke that seeks to argue their
irrelevance
...
The companionate model of marriage, therefore, replaces the authoritar- ian, patriarchal model
...
” p68

"Later, however, when she is subjected to the op- pressive atmosphere surrounding General Tilney at
Milsom-street, she is “puzzled” and cannot “account for” the collective unease: “It could not be General
Tilney’s fault
...
That he is handsome and
Henry’s father certainly contribute to her desire to think well of him, but she is also swayed by the fact that
he is a gentleman and in a respected position of authority
...
His “‘Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and
Louisas’” (107) establishes him as an expert in the gothic genre
...
On the ride up to the Abbey, he stokes her curios- ity, fuels
her fear, validates her interest
...
” p73

LECTURE NOTES:

Paternal in Masculine gothic:

- Oedipal conflict

- Son struggles against past

- Key social relation is between son and son (not father and son)

    - Raymond asks Lorenzo to marry Agnes


- Contruct in contrast to patriarchal, is revolutionary

- Friendship between men

- Wife and daughter as centre of social world, domestic

- Birth of modern feminism

- Moment in terms of development in terms of male identity

    - men orient themselves in relation to the family - key source of value (not God)

    - Sense of feeling - emotion, sensitivity, not dominant

    - Androgynous - Lorenzo

Northanger Abbey

- Novel was a genre with which women were actively involved - perceived that large percentage/majority
were women

    - Dilemma for masculine culture

    - Takes women away from culture, subjectivity not policed by states culture

    - Sets up trope - women associated with mass culture

- Paternal family - women meant to be centre, open perceptive, empathy, virtue

    - women also reading gothic fiction

    - emotions and sensitivities raises, heightened by artificial stimulus

    - Become a new source of anxiety

    - Guide books for young women

- Women aren’t always good and moral and fair

    - belief that men are monsters

    - sentiment

    - language of fiction

    - divine sensibilty - appears externally

    - Catherine guilty of all of them

        - General Tilney

        - Lives in regions of fictions

- Key image critique of text - veil

    - Udolpho critique of patriarchy - behind patriarchal figure, rightful owner is a women

- Behind the surface of things is the suffering of women

    - Rad - women readers to look behind the surface

    - Austen- social world, etiquette is veil

- Female sensibility or male reason

- Nothing behind the veil - Catherine’s imaginings out of place

    - punishing Catherine, bringing women back to Earth

    - Discipline

    - Threat to gothic

    - Education of Catherine

- How gothic romance should be read


Gothic in everyday life

ART 2: “[Thorpe lies about Tilney’s having left already - they pass them in the carriage, he won’t let
Catherine out] “The gothic reminiscence is clear here, but it is not as strong as the immediate appeal to our
normal moral disapproval
...
Catherine’s
unintentional “breach of propriety” (105) could have resulted in a permanent breach with the Tilneys and
perhaps in- jured her character
...
” p93


"For Catherine, the threat of sexual violence is real, and it comes from the repulsive John Thorpe, who
deceives and seduces her—through place, rather than person—in order to abduct her on the abortive drive
to Clifton
...
When Catherine, wavering, asks whether they
might “‘go all over [Blaize Castle]?
...
John’s response is disturbingly fraught, as
the term “hole and corner” refers to clandestine, especially clandestine sexual, schemes
...
John would like nothing better than to trap Catherine into
a dark corner—and hence into marriage with him
...
[H]is wielding of the whip, his glee at her
helplessness, his control of the situation reveal Austen’s recognition of the ease with which a comic so- cial
encounter could turn into a kind of Gothic horror” (251)
...
Austen makes him seem a
laughable villain with his mediocre looks, clumsy manners, and vulgarity, but these qualities add to his
menace
...
John’s physical and social repulsiveness highlights his moral ugliness
...
Austen
deliberately strips her villain of any charm, thus stripping away the veneer of romanticism disguising the
sordid- ness of abduction
...
Had she seen
herself as a gothic heroine-victim, she would have failed to assert herself; unaware of her victimization,
though, she doesn’t “spare” John her outraged “reproaches,” and for the rest of the drive is aloof and
taciturn (87- 89)
...
Her “complaisance was no longer what it had been in their former airing
...
When John calls James “‘a fool for not keeping a
horse and gig of his own,’” Catherine defends her brother “warmly” for living within his means; afterwards,
“she was less and less disposed either to be agreeable her- self, or to find her companion so; and they
returned to Pulteney-street without her speaking twenty words” (89)
...
They are more desperate
now, as the Tilneys constitute a greater threat to their matrimonial schemes
...
I
must run after Miss Tilney directly and set her right’” (100, emphasis mine)
...
caught hold of one hand; Thorpe of the other; and re- monstrances poured in
...
Though she sets this gothic episode—thus disguising its nature—on the Crescent in
broad daylight, Austen makes Catherine a prisoner
...
Catherine is being bodily restrained
...

Now the force is two people binding her hands; the Thorpes become her gaolers and her manacles
...
James’s willingness, through most of this scene, to sacrifice his sister for his
sweetheart is too close to that of Udolpho’s Madame Cheron for comfort
...
In Catherine’s
defense, however, the clues to Eleanor’s gothic plight are subtle
...
not caring to have it put off, made a point of her being denied’” (94)
...
Even when cheerful, his presence subdues her
...
Eleanor admits to feeling lonely, and laments her mother’s
death, especially since “‘A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been
beyond all other’” (180)
...
Austen, like her more sensational predecessors, uses Northanger Abbey to
warn young women—and men—not about the dangers ofreading too many novels, but about the dangers
to their amorous and socio-economic security from powerful and opportunistic members of society
...
”p103


Reading Gothic Novels

ART 3: "In Chapter 5, the author nevertheless justifies the writing of novels and her heroine's reading of
them, thus linking her own work with those parodied in it
...
” p120

"”
...
  Yes, novels; for I will not adopt
that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous
censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding–joining with their
greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to
be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages
in disgust
...
” AUSTEN

ART 5: "For Catherine's dismissal of Radcliffe is prefaced by the inaccurate remark that her gothic
"reading" of Northanger "had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion" (199), when in fact she has little
more than “literalized” the plot provided for her by Henry” p9-10 

"And if Henry can be said to read or interpret Northanger Abbey for the reader, it is in the most literal sense
that he reads Udolpho to his sister: "Yes," added Miss Tilney, "and I remember that you undertook to read it
[Udolpho] aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of
waiting for me, you took the volume
...
The
conditions under which Eleanor is read Udolpho effectively replicate the content of the novel she is read: by
abducting the text, "by running away with the volume, which, you are to observe, was her own, particularly
her own" (107), Henry re- hearses the act of abduction thematized by Udolpho
...
The
difference, however, is for the sake of similarity: the atrocity about which Eleanor reads is re- peated, albeit
in a different modality, in her experience of reading
...
” p17

ART 7: " Unable to perceive his selfishness and conceit—his desire to walk when and where he pleases, to
impress Catherine with his important involvement in "the affairs of the nation”— she looks for "some deeper
cause" (p
...
She locates it in her gothic fantasy about a wife murdered, or at least shut up in some
remote corner of the Abbey
...
To control the reader’s responses to novels, to make him discriminate finely, Jane
Austen includes direct comment on
...
” p58

"Isabella’s use of novelistic clichbs immediately betrays her shallowness
...
” Some of these novels com- bine the sentimental with the Gothic and deal extensively with the
heroine’s inner world as she undergoes her horrid experiences
...
The values that the narrator shares with Catherine but not with Isabella are underlined when
Isabella assumes, in her convention-bound man- ner, that Catherine’s mother must object to novels
...
Morland “very often reads Sir Charles Grundi- son herself” (p
...
” p59

The novel does not attack Catherine’s imagination; rather it attacks the selfishly circumscribed imagination
represented by the Thorpes and General Tilney
...
lO The characters who
are most under- standing of human nature and who teach Catherine most-Henry and Eleanor Tilney-are
associated with an imaginative world that the Thorpes do not comprehend
...
Isabella likes Gothic novels, but, without
attempting to read Sir Charles Grandison, decides that it is unreadable; Eleanor’s tastes, far from being
limited to Gothic novels, are so broad that they include even history
...
” p61-2

ART 10: "Yet, Northanger Abbey also contains the famous “defense of the novel,” which shows that
Austen’s work, too, was written, at least in part, for aesthetic reasons
...
It is that
(literary) taste matters… Or more precisely, she learns to lose the veneer of (bad) taste she had temporarily
acquired from trendsetting Isabella Thorpe during her stay in Bath
...
” p110

"Her narrator also displays a preference for works whose pertinent trait is verisimilitude and, by subjecting
poor Catherine Morland to the mental confusion of gothic nightmare and hellish reality at Northanger, she
demonstrates how much bet- ter it would have been for her heroine to read Cecilia, Camilla, or Belinda, instead of The Monk, or even The Mysteries of Udolpho
...
” p111

ART 11: "Eleanor enjoys novels too, but she trusts history—male history—more, and therefore trusts herself
less
...
Catherine, because of her dislike of history and her love of novels, is bet- ter able to
exercise her power; Zlotnick posits that “Catherine’s prescient cri- tique of women’s absence from history
arises from her reading of Radcliffe,” and her “devotion to Radcliffe
...
and thereby leaves open the possibility of a different future” (288)
...
” p103

ART 12: "Although Catherine as- sumes that novels are for women and that “‘gentlemen read better
books,’” Henry is an avid reader of novels, notably all of Mrs
...
” p70

"From the be- ginning of their acquaintance, Henry takes pains to set himself up as an au- thority figure in
Catherine’s eyes
...
He encourages her interest in the novels,
describing his own visceral reading experience
...
Then, when she acts out the story on her own, he flays her with his words,
and this confrontation concludes a most interesting scene
...
Their conversation consists of "the first rudiments of an acquaintance," exploring nothing more
profound than their opinion of Bath and their accomplishments on piano and horseback (p
...
The
reader's judgment of this encounter is informed not by Henry's characterization of Bath conventions but by
the sudden intimacy of Catherine and Isabella Thorpe
...
And if by
chance a reader has failed to perceive this, Austen explicitly states her approval of the exchange:

"they continued talking together as long as both parties remained in the room; and though in all probability
not an observation was made, not an expression used by either which had not been made and used some
thousands of times before, under that roof, in every Bath season, yet the merit of their being spoken with
simplicity and truth, and without personal conceit, might be something uncommon, (p
...
The first usage occurs during his initial meeting with Catherine, at the
completion of their socially scripted repartee: “‘Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational
again,’” he concludes (26), effectively classifyinh most social exchanges as irrational

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