Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey As A Parody On Traditional Gothic Fiction
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Making Fun of Gothic Novels:
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey as a Parody on Traditional Gothic Fiction
In a particular genre of novels, the setting of the story is most likely some kind of mansion or old castle and the mood is always quite mysterious. These are some of the aspects that belong to traditional gothic novels, but for some reason also occur in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. At first the story does not look like a typical gothic novel, however it seems to evolve into one when you start reading volume 2. Should Northanger Abbey be labelled as gothic then? Or can it be considered as something else? Clearly it is the latter: the setting and events that occur in volume 2 of Jane Austen’s work are deliberately put like this to portray Northanger Abbey as a parody of traditional gothic novels.…show more content… Take The Abbey of Clunedale by Nathan Drake for example, in this story the author describes an abbey as a “venerable structure” (327) which “had experienced a rapid decay” (327). Jane Austen does the same in Northanger Abbey, but the description she gives later turns out to be false, a clear sign of mockery. At some point in the story of Northanger Abbey, two of the main characters, Catherine and Henry, are travelling to the abbey. Henry starts to describe the abbey as being full of horror and similar to the structures in gothic stories: “are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as ‘what one reads about’ may produce?” (Austen 149). Catherine is now expecting the abbey to have all kinds of gothic features, which can be read in the following