Something Very Horrid

Even if you haven't read any gothic novels from the late 1700s, Austen's parody in Northanger Abbey makes many of their conventions fairly clear. A beautiful heroine finds her self in old castle or abbey--the older the better. It is filled with mysterious noises and lights. It has secret, locked chambers and staircases. Old cabinets and trunks hold secret manuscripts. The inhabitants are oppressed by a force no one seems able to name. The heroine herself has, in all likelihood, been kidnapped and brought to the castle against her will--locked up in one of the chambers herself, perhaps.

Austen domesticates many of these events in her novel. She makes the kidnapping, for example, into a event that hinges more on the social impropriety of backing out of a prior engagement than on actual abduction. The heroine is not taken away from her home, but sent back to it. Mysterious manuscripts turn out to be laundry bills. And while we can easily see the amusement in reversing or miniaturizing the overblown events of the gothic, it might be more difficult to see why she does this.

As many have noted, Austen was suspicious of some of the currents of thought represented by the gothic. The exaggerated feelings of sympathy and sensibility, the heightened workings of the imagination, and the preference for old, ruined buildings and landscapes--Romance--are her targets in many of her novels. Did common people really have such exaggerated feelings for potential lovers that they would refuse to eat or sleep? Would anyone really prefer an old house with ancient furnishing to one fitted up with modern conveniences?

At the same time that Austen seems to be arguing that the novel might accommodate common people's stories (notice how often the word "common" shows up in the novel itself!), gothic terrors creep in as not entirely unfounded. This is especially true, of course, in the case of General Tilney. Catherine is right about many of her surmises--he is an oppressive force, there is a mystery about him, he is cruel and tyrannical. Is it possible that Austen finds more truth in the gothic than it seems on a first reading?