"northanger Abbey" The Historical Tradition Of The Gothic Novel And Practical Significance

This is a thesis about why horror stories continue to have such a hold over our imagination and perceptions, to attract and repel us for over a hundred years, and how the metaphor of horror slowly evolved from a frivolous escape to a model for an inescapable reality. The majority of the reading public picks up horror stories, especially Gothic novels in expectation of an escape from the realities of daily experience. And horror stories attract their audience by frightening it, two seemingly contradictory impulses. It is undoubted that a few very special stories have helped determine the way we see the world around us.Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has been described as a devastating parody of the Gothic novel. As a close look at Northanger Abbey, and the Gothic craze that surrounded it makes clear, the act of reading gave a vast new audience a way both to escape the world and to find deeper meaning in it. Like the audience for Gothic fiction (of which she is an avid member) Catherine Morland's reading provides the framework for her imaginative life. But it also influences the way she sees the world around her. However, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen goes beyond making fun of the power of popular fiction to distort our view of reality. For by the end of her novel, Catherine Morland has indeed become heroic, and the Gothic fiction she reads has indeed proven true, though in ways far more subtle than she first imagined. Her obsession with the literature of fears turns out to be less a retreat from ordinary life and more a way into it. Her propensity to read life as it were a tale of terror becomes a strength, not a weakness and a key to understanding the continuing hold horror stories had on the imagination of an entire culture for the next century and beyond.