On Gothic Feelings In Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is one of the first novels of Jane Austen, the famous Britishnovelist in the nineteenth century. Different from the other works, which simplydiscuss the female’s love and marriage issue, in Northanger Abbey, the authorexpresses her personal view on Gothic fiction, a literary fade prevailing from the endof the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century.Northanger Abbey is a novel inspired from The Mysteries of Udolpho, one of thefamous Gothic novels during Jane Austen’s adult life. The story revolves around amain protagonist, the unsophisticated and sincere Catherine Morland and heradventures and misadventures in Bath and Northanger Abbey. There are manyGothic-like conventions in the novel. The title is of Gothic, the setting of the secondpart of the novel used to be a real abbey—a typical Gothic place and the plots areunfolded with the intention of the heroine, a Gothic fan, who desires to seek Gothicstory in the reality.Traditionally, many critics hold the point that this novel is a parody of the Gothicnovels, especially a parody of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. In thisnovel, the author satires the readers, mostly the female, who, addicted to the stories inthe Gothic world, cannot differentiate between the illusory fiction and the reality.However, more and more critics in recent years believe that Northanger Abbeyactually implies there are Gothic elements in the real society, which is a peculiarimitation of the Gothic tradition. It projects anxiety and terror of human beings whenthey confront great changes of society and their life style. Some hyper-postmoderncritics even give up on deciding whether or not the novel intends anything, since theynote both the possible conservative and subversive meanings of the novel, andcontend that the ironies of the text are too numerous and too reversible to allow areader to find any stable position.How to understand the real Gothic views of the novel? The purpose of this thesisis to identify Northanger Abbey’s exact ideology of Gothic novels from theperspective narrative theory. Combined with the concept of implied author, historicalcontext analysis and method of close-reading in the text, this thesis plans to analysethe attitude to the Gothic genre from the views of both the real author and the impliedauthor（the latter is more important）, and tries to prove that the author’s paradoxical Gothic feelings do exist in the novel.This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one deals with the relationshipbetween English Gothic novels and Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, revealingthe conflicting criticisms on the novel: Northanger Abbey is a parody of Gothicnovels on the one hand and it implies a Gothic reality on the other hand. Chapter twoconcerns the attitude of the real author of Northanger Abbey, trying to indicate herambiguous opinion to the Gothic fade. And chapter three, the most important part ofthis paper, focuses on the implied author’s Gothic feelings in the text itself, which isexpressed from three aspects: the title of the book, the direct depiction of thenarrator’s attitude and other elements of the narration in the novel, including plotdesigned, the characters designed and the settings designed.