Keats Northanger Abbey: Tropes Of Dark Romanticism

The Romantic era is denoted by an extensive questioning and expression of challenging notions building on the convictions of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment challenged the Christian Orthodoxy which had dominated Europe for 1,000 years. Romanticism proposed an exploration of self, emphasising the primacy of the individual and a vision of humankind animated by the imagination, endorsing a reverence and personal connection to nature. The set texts Fancy and Ode to a Nightingale explore a world created by imagination, emphasising the importance of reflection and sustaining a relationship with nature. Northanger Abbey however, examines the interplay between reason and imagination. The related text Thanatopsis possesses tropes of Dark Romanticism,
Romantics believed that ‘Fancy’ was crucial to the expansion of the human mind and spirit. Keats frequently references the imagination as a source of elation and exhilaration, his poem Fancy focusing on how the creative power of the mind can enhance the human experience and impart immortality. “She will bring, in spite of frost,/Beauties that the earth hath lost;” Keats implies that Fancy is a way of preserving feelings and periods, providing an escape from the bitterness of a Romantic ideologue’s reality. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant acknowledged imagination as the source of order and Friedrich Von Schelling argued that imagination had “a divine quality that was triggered by the generating power of the universe.” The divine was quintessential to Romantic ideology, Romantics striving for perfectibility which they felt was only achieved through
This is evident in the prevalence of references to the Exotic and Gothic in Romantic texts. Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci tells of a woman of supernatural beauty, describing her as “a faery’s child” implying the seductress is other-worldly. This fascination with the Exotic was a response to the novelty of international exploration. Romantics had an obsession with other cultures different either in time or distance: the old and the primitive (Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn a perfect example of how the ancient influenced Romantic texts through his frequent references to ancient Greece as he describes “Tempe or the dales of Arcady?”), Oriental, alien, vanished or Gothic. Following naturally from the Romantic interest with the old and exotic was an attraction to the supernatural and bizarre as seen in Gothicism. Gothicism was the preoccupation with the supernatural, influenced by a desire to defy the God-fearing Catholic Church. Examples of its relevance in Romantic texts can be seen in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Bryant’s Thanatopsis. Bronte writes of “spectres” whilst Bryant writes of “His favourite phantom” portraying the Romantic predilection to the