This is a paper I wrote for one of my English classes. This includes only the introduction and first body paragraph
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: Satire of the Gothic Elements and its Contribution to Themes of Experience and Innocence
Satire is the use of humor or exaggeration to show how foolish or wicked some people’s behavior or ideas are or to criticize something. It is a mockery. A caricature. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, she uses satire as the basis for her novel, for it is a satire of gothic novels. Aurélie Chevaleyre in "Gothic Humour and Satire in Gothic Novels" says, "In our case, Northanger Abbey is a satire in which Jane Austen portrays her society and questions its conventions and values" (Chevaleyre 11). Austen also satarizes her main character Catherine, as she was “born to be an heroine”, the protagonist of a gothic novel. Throughout the book we see Catherine’s development from a “plain-looking” child to an “almost pretty” young adult. Within this development, Catherine has taken a liking to novels, particularly gothic novels and literature, for she found educational books, such as historical ones, a “torment.” This marks the beginning of Catherines unlikely becoming of a heroine. In Northanger Abbey, Austen uses satire of the gothic elements and novels to contribute to themes of innocence and experience through Catherine’s distorted view of reality, the way she lacks real world experience and is naive, and the fact that she thinks of herself as the heroine of a gothic novel.
From the very beginning of the novel, it is evident that Catherine Morland will grow to have a distorted view of reality because of her reading of Gothic novels. Being the fourth of ten children and having to fend for herself at such a young age, for her mother spent most of her time teaching the younger children, it is understandable that Catherine is not well educated in certain subjects and when she begins reading Gothic novels, she sees the world as something different than what it is because she was not educated on it properly. This is seen when the narrator tells the reader that Catherine did not care for learning or reading up until she was 15 years old. She would rather partake in activities advocated for boys. If she did read, it was that of novels, nothing geared towards education at all. This is what makes her such an unlikely heroine in the beginning, for she is not well educated. She also was not musically inclined and her mother didn’t expect her to be, for she did not like the typical things that a young girl should:
And it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books--or at least books of information--for, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine. (Austen 3)
