Heroism In Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey'

Jane Austen Research Paper Rough Draft

The Romantic Literary period, despite it’s name, showed emotion rather than romance. The authors of this period were reacting to the period before them, the Enlightenment Period, which instead valued reason over emotion. Authors like William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen expressed this reaction through their novels and poems. Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey”, a novel of the Romantic Literary period, expressed ideas of an unlikely heroine, imagination battling reality, and marriage. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” (Austen, 1). This quote suggests that Austen wants to incorporate Gothic themes like heroism,
The painful remembrance of the folly it had helped to nourish and perfect, was the only emotion which could spring from a consideration of the building.” (Austen, 257). This quote implies that Catherine’s constant obsession with Gothic novels led her to believe in this fictional haunted house that brought her to disappointment once she was faced with reality. Austen did this to parody the wild imagination that occured commonly seen in Gothic novels in her time. “Just as there is a distinction drawn by Austen between the notion of Bath as an exciting, racy place, where there is never a dull moment, and the rather disappointing reality, so there is a distinction drawn between the abbey as it appears in Catherine's fanciful conjectures, and as it really is” (Moore, 2002). “Her fearful curiosity was every moment growing greater; and seizing, with trembling hands, the hasp of the lock, she resolved at all hazards to satisfy herself at least as to its contents.” (Austen, 197). This quote reveals the overwhelming suspense Austen wanted to show through Catherine’s curiosity from her novels. “The only “Horrid Mysteries” to be found there are the ones spawned by Catherine's overwrought imagination” (Moore, 2002). “Catherine, as she crossed the hall, listened to the tempest with sensations of awe; and, when she heard it rage round a corner of the ancient building and close with sudden fury a distant door, felt for the first time that she was really in an Abbey.” (Austen, 201). This quote unveils that Catherine’s imagination continuously grows more and more as she explores this house despite the reality being that it was just a normal, aged house. Austen wanted to show how lost Catherine seems to get in her head from believing these Gothic novels she reads constantly and how she can’t seem to separate this from reality. “Gothic fantasy is plausible when treated as stylised and exaggerated entertainment - the