Northanger
Abbey "Further Notes"
Northanger
Abbey Looks as if it was put together from two separate pieces: a skit on the Fanny Burney style of social novel, telling of a young woman's first experience of polite society, added to a satire on Gothic Fiction.
In Catherine Morland, Jane Austen presents a stock figure of current satire, the young woman so captivated by the exotic thrills of the Gothic that she is ready to see the world through the lens of her latest reading, in this case the most popular of all such novels, THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO (1794) by Anne Radcliffe. Employing this common satirical device, Jane Austen's special twist was to show that the heroine doesn't have to look for excitement in books since there is a Gothicism of ordinary life, which can be experienced in the clear light of day.
This is the literary beginning to an issue raised again and again for the heroines of the six novels: the need to distinguish between ILLUSION and REALITY, to be aware that the IMAGINATION has the POWER TO ENFORCE its own SLANTED VISION upon the world. It is part of the struggle that the heroines have with the forces of pride and prejudice and with sense and sensiblity, and which Emma Woodhouse faces in romantically casting Harriet Smith in the role of a distressed heroine and herslef as a confidante-savior. The educative process of the novels is to take the heroines along the path of disillusionment toward a clearer, unimpeded knowledge of themselves and their relationships; and the literary delusion is one of the blocks that they have to overcome.