NORTHANGER ABBEY - JANE AUSTEN AND THE PARODY OF THE GOTHIC VOGUE

Gothic novels were extremely popular at the end of the 18th century and that taste or vogue involved all social classes. Most of those novels followed the same pattern with few alterations: great importance given to terror and horror – as two different ingredients, since the first was characterised by obscurity and uncertainty and the latter by evil and atrocity; ancient settings like isolated castles, dungeons, secret rooms, mysterious abbeys or convents; supernatural beings like vampires, ghosts, witches, monsters; a triad of main characters including an oversensitive persecuted heroine, a terrifying/satanic male villain and a sensitive honourable hero. 

After Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” , very popular Gothic tales were Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho” (1794) and “The Monk” by Matthew Lewis (1796) .

In the same years Miss Jane Austen dreamt of “living on 
her pen”, writing her first novels “of manners”. Between 1795-96 she had finished Elinore and Marianne, later on published as Sense and Sensibility, as well as First impressions then published as Pride and Prejudice. Was she interested in Gothic novels or did she attempt to write one? Since irony and satire were her favourite literary “weapons”, she preferred writing a parody of such sentimental, fashionable genre. 
In 1798 she wrote Northanger Abbey, never published during her life for reasons left unknown, which is in fact an open mocking of the genre.

Young Catherine Morland’s story develops some of  Jane Austen’s favourite themes, the initiation of a young woman into the complexities of adult social life and the danger of imagination uncontrolled by reason and common sense. Catherine’s mistake is that she imposes the melodramatic values of the gothic novels she reads (i.e. “The mysteries of Udolpho” by A. Radcliffe) on the reality around her, making the boundaries between the real and the imaginary quite uncertain.

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