The Influence Of Miss Brodie In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

From early on in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the level of influence that Miss Brodie has over the lives of the ‘[girls] who formed the Brodie set’ is revealed through the use of the collective noun ‘set’ as this implies that rather than being individuals, they become, as Sandy later comments, ‘a body with Miss Brodie as the head’. Throughout the course of the novel Miss Brodie repeatedly displays admiration for Adolf Hitler, who she likens to a ‘prophet figure’, while her treatment of the girls often reflects Hitler’s own actions. Similar to how Hitler reduced people, specifically Jews, to typecasts in propaganda in order to segregate them and purify the German race, Brodie also reduces the girls in her set to stereotypes. This effectively
Briony’s betrayal and tendency for storytelling reflects the actions of Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, a passage from which McEwan includes as an epigraph. Catherine, like Briony, has an overactive imagination and is obsessed with stories, specifically gothic fiction, which causes her to accuse a perfectly innocent man of murder, thereby creating a gothic tale to fit her own life. By including a passage from Austen’s novel, McEwan asks the reader to draw comparisons between the two characters, both of whom entertain mistaken ‘suspicions’ and misinterpreted ‘observations’ which lead them to accusing innocent men of crimes they did not commit. It therefore also offers a foreshadowing of the events in the novel, however the fundamental difference between the two novels is that while Northanger Abbey has a happy ending with Catherine Morland ending up with the man she loves, Briony’s mistaken accusation results in the destruction of both her life, and the lives of Robbie and