Northanger Abbey: an Escape from Fiction?

Abstract

Northanger Abbey is the most text-dominated of Austen’s novels. As a parody of the Gothic and sentimental novels popular in Austen’s day it traces the education of Catherine Morland, a young girl enmeshed in her favourite fictions, these same novels of Gothic horror and sentiment. Catherine must not only escape her reliance on popular fiction; she must also escape her reliance on language as an absolute. At the beginning of the novel, Catherine is a literal reader, both of her favourite novels and of the words of the other characters she encounters. She is entrapped by the fictions which other characters choose to tell about her as well as by those they tell about themselves. In a sense, Catherine’s education in Northanger Abbey consists of learning to be a good reader, to recognize that it is dangerous to expect language or its fictional constructs to offer a one-to-one correspondence with real life. Northanger Abbey is structured like a Chinese box of fictions within fictions within fictions; Catherine’s education consists of breaking through each layer of fabrication into a closer approximation of ‘reality’.¹ The beginning of the novel features the parodic description of Catherine’s qualifications as a heroine and establishes her as an anti-heroine. The end of the novel is equally self-conscious. Austen collapses the fictional design by calling attention to her own role as author and creator and to Catherine’s role as character and creation. But between these two points, Catherine learns to be a good eighteenth century empiricist, judging actions instead of words. Her judgment of Henry Tilney provides the one significant exception — as we later shall see.