Northanger Abbey: Study Questions

1. What is the significance of Jane Austen's treatment of earlier fiction--both for the world she seeks to create within her own novel and for the rhetorical relationships she wants to establish among author, narrator, text, and reader? How serious is her defense of (possibly second- rate) fiction? Is she establishing an ironic narrative tone in her comments on novels and novel reading, and if so, what is the force of the irony?

2. More specifically, what is the relationship between Catherine's status as a heroine (or non-heroine) of fiction and her emergence as a character we care about? Do we ever take her seriously, and if so, when do we do so? What is the relationship (if any) between the development of our view of Catherine and the development of Henry Tilney's love?

3. One of the major difficulties of novels and romances, after all, is their spread of dangerous and misleading illusions. What are the characteristic illusions (personal and literary) from which the characters seem to suffer in Northanger Abbey? How are these illusions related to one another? In particular, what is the relationship between the illusions of fiction and the illusions of experience?

4. Much of the character of the first half of Northanger Abbey derives from its setting in the city of Bath. What is the general significance of Bath in the novel? What is its particular significance for Catherine? Is there a relationship among the place, the customs associated with the place, and the people whom Catherine meets there?

5. In the second half of Northanger Abbey Catherine gets fairly detained tours of the Abbey itself and of Henry Tilney's more modest parsonage. What is learned from the architecture and topography of the Abbey and environs? What is learned about Henry and his father as owners and improvers of their estates, and what is its significance?

6. Catherine's suspicions of Gothic evils turn out to be wrong, the fantasies of an inexperienced, badly read adolescent--or do they? Is there actual evil in the novel (or do the characters merely suffer from mutual illusions and misimpressions)? If there is real evil, what is its nature, where does it lie, and what, if anything, is its connection with Catherine's Gothic illusions?

7. Catherine is partly talked out of her Gothic fantasies by the kindly rationalism of Henry Tilney? The source of Catherine's fantasies is fairly clear, but what is the source of Henry's rationalism? Is it social convention? Is it the common-sense acceptance of the real (and therefore the ordinary)? Can rationality also be heroic? For that matter, in the long run, how rational is Henry's character? What are the appropriate limits of rationality in general (and his in particular)?

8. Are the Thorpes thematically significant or even necessary to the plot? Are they merely foils to set off Catherine and the Tilneys? Is it valid and useful to group the Thorpes as characters? Do they share family resemblances? Does Jane Austen use the family as an element of characterization and moral evaluation in the novel?

9. If families are important, what is the importance of relationships between generations in the novel? Is the older generation authoritative? Is there a youth culture? (Does Jane Austen see novel reading as the MTV of the 1790's?) If the stable realism of an older generation restrains the illusions of youth, to what degree do the young expand and develop the limitations of the old?

10. One way of looking at Northanger Abbey (related to the previous question) is to see it as a novel of education, and in this light it appears as part of a tradition, going back to Lennox's Female Quixote and Burney's Evelina, of novels dealing with the first appearance of young women in society. Two obvious questions follow: (A) If Northanger Abbey is part of a well established tradition, what gives the novel its liveliness in treating its familiar theme? (B) If Northanger Abbey is a novel of education, what, in fact, does Catherine learn, and what is the significance of the way she learns it?

11. One repeated element of the novel is transportation-rather self-conscious reference to horses, coaches (public and private), walking, and the conventions of travel in the period. How are these references important? How do they differentiate and evaluate characters and attitudes? How do they generate meaning?

12. One could argue that, whatever its other merits, Northanger Abbey is a poorly plotted novel--that the motivations of the characters are unconvincing, that the machinations that move the plot along have little to do with the novel's thematic development, that the thematic development itself is pretty conventional, and that the novel's conclusion yields no worthwhile surprises. Right? Don't give me that "wonderful Jane Austen" stuff--doesn't Northanger Abbey add up to a charming failure at best?

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