Mortality In Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey'

Dr. John Halbrooks
EH 421
21 November 2016
Fictionality and Forgiveness
Fictionality is relationship between the author and the reader. As readers, we trust the author to be honest in revealing their stories to us. However, often times they are exploring with concepts or conventions that we are not even aware of until the ending. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, she has produced a commentary on the gothic novel while using Catherine Morland is the inexperienced young heroine who expects the real world to follow the formula of her favorite novels. Ian McEwan uses Briony who is naïve in her own right, but much more controlling, believing that she is right about everything at only 13 years old. Both of these novels use different tactics to
They would typically include a young woman in distress at the hands of a dark and powerful man. These were set usually in mysterious castle with secrets and passageways. Catherine Morland, our “unexpected” heroine in Northanger Abbey, is an ordinary young woman of 17. Austen’s first description of her materializes how normal she is. Her father, a clergy-man, earned a good and honest living for their family. Catherine was not outstanding in regards to physical appearance and average intelligence and she was a bit of a tomboy growing up, until puberty struck and she began to care about her appearance and gave way to more elegant activities, such as reading novels. It is in these novels that Catherine bases her knowledge of the world, and the reader’s first taste of Austen’s satirical sword. For a young, naïve woman, reading gothic novels where women are snatched from their homes, or reading old men’s poetry which tended to illustrate women as nothing more than “pretty,” Catherine’s ideas of the real world grow to be skewed and unrealistic as she journeys to Bath on her own at the care of Mrs. Allen, a family friend.
Austen’s narration describes Catherine “being aware” of herself as a heroine, and hopes that her journey to bath will successfully put a hero in her story, which is, once again, Austen toying with the fictionality of
He theorizes the plane of Forms, a place only reached with mind, is complete perfection, where humans have attempted to recreate it only to fail. While constructing her novel, this world that she has created as the perfect story, will exist longer than the one in which she lied, and sent an innocent man to die in World War I and her estranged sister to die in a subway station during a bombing. The story created in the mind of Briony is much more permanent to Plato, as it the form found in the Transcendent plane, that we would attempt to mimic in the material