Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen’s earliest novel written in 1798. As Jane Austen helpfully informs us at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland isn’t really much of a heroine. The author wishes to reprove the romanticism of a fiction-reading young girl. Catherine Morland is not even a romantic character. She is a lot of things your typical heroine isn’t. She isn’t especially beautiful, smart, wealthy, or tragic. This is, of course, exactly the point in Austen’s intentions to strain the Gothic novel, which generally featured almost foolishly heroic young females.
We can find the parallelism between the life of Jane Austen and Catherine, the protagonist of the novel. In the Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s childhood is partly similar than Austen’s childhood. Both Austen and Catherine preferred boy’s plays, for example cricket. Catherine’s father was also clergyman and she has many brothers and sisters such as Jane Austen. Austen’s family spent several years in Bath, and we know that one part of the novel takes place in Bath. Jane Austen in her novels wrote about simple, ordinary people and their trivial life. Her happy family background has an enormous effect to her writings. The places, characters and themes of her novels were shaped from her own world.
This novel is a Gothic parody. Austen contrasts romance with reality. It is interesting that a woman skits Gothic romance, because it was usual that romance was a female genre, I mean that those books were mostly written for women and they were eager to read them. Maybe they could sympathize with the main female character, who was usually a romantic heroine. But Austen was an exception. She preferred writing about real-like characters and situations, probably because she was inspired by her own life. In Northanger Abbey, she uses irony to emphasize her point. For example, in Chapter III, when Henry asks Catherine whether she keeps a journal or not, Catherine simply answers that she doesn’t. Now we can see that Catherine is nothing like a romantic heroine. However, Henry thinks that all women write journal or at least they should, because its so romantic. That reveals for us one main difference between man and female Gothic. For women, Gothic novel meant development. Although Ann Radcliffe still emphasizes this difference in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Austen rather uses references to those contemporary Gothic novels while she skits that genre in the face of the ordinary novel. In this way, she also wants to disperse men’s stereotypes about women and she rather wanted to emphasize reality.
