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Comments on Northanger Abbey
Jul. 4th, 2015 09:51 amI finished this book last week or so. It was not actually a parody of The Mysteries of Udolpho, though it may have been a bit satiric of it. Northanger Abbey was an Austen romance, not a gothic, in which the author, via the heroine, snipes at Ann Radcliffe's stories (such as Udolpho).
The first bit is the protagonist: I gather that Austen thought Radcliffe's heroines were precious little Mary Sues (she would have completely understood the modern concept) and deliberately made her heroine the opposite: plain, not incredibly intelligent, indifferent as to education, not especially virtuous and obedient as a daughter, not inclined to writing poetry or the arts, but just Jane Average and a tom-boy. Her parents are pointedly not tragically dead, nor are they cruel guardians--they are laid-back, agreeable people who love their children.
Of course, the girls in the story have been reading Udolpho and think it is the most awesome thing since sliced bread... at first. Later on, our protagonist gets herself in a bit of embarrassment because she lets her Udolpho-inspired imagination run away with her and imagines a cruel tragedy committed by her boyfriend's father--but the hidden manuscript turns out to be someone's forgotten laundry list, and the general's "guilty aversion" to the portraits and topic of his dead wife are the still-lively grief of a man whose beloved wife died when he was away on vital business and couldn't get home in time to be at her bedside. Our heroine realizes (after her dryly-sarcastic boyfriend points it out) that dark, tragic secret crimes might be possible in isolated manors in southern France of the mountains of Italy, but in midlands England, where everyone is all over his neighbor's business and a servant can't sneeze without everyone in the county gossiping about their cold, and our legal system really doesn't go along with that sort of thing? Yeah, no.
The titular abbey turns out not to be the "romantic" ruin Catherine imagined it to be--her boyfriend's family has modernized and expanded the place, because it's where they live, and wealthy families don't camp in ruins. (It would appear Catherine missed the part in Udolpho where Montoni was having the castle repaired and modernized, too...) After seeing how many servants the general has to maintain the abbey, Catherine becomes skeptical of just how realistic her gothic novels are, that have one or two old servants maintaining an empty manor or castle.
Finally, Austen clearly disliked the bad romance trope mentioned in my remarks on Mysteries of Udolpho: stupid misunderstandings that persist for half the book that could be cleared up by five minutes of conversation. Several places she pointedly has Catherine NOT jump to the conclusion that someone's brother or sister who she has not met yet is their secret lover so they can have a big misunderstanding over it.
The first bit is the protagonist: I gather that Austen thought Radcliffe's heroines were precious little Mary Sues (she would have completely understood the modern concept) and deliberately made her heroine the opposite: plain, not incredibly intelligent, indifferent as to education, not especially virtuous and obedient as a daughter, not inclined to writing poetry or the arts, but just Jane Average and a tom-boy. Her parents are pointedly not tragically dead, nor are they cruel guardians--they are laid-back, agreeable people who love their children.
Of course, the girls in the story have been reading Udolpho and think it is the most awesome thing since sliced bread... at first. Later on, our protagonist gets herself in a bit of embarrassment because she lets her Udolpho-inspired imagination run away with her and imagines a cruel tragedy committed by her boyfriend's father--but the hidden manuscript turns out to be someone's forgotten laundry list, and the general's "guilty aversion" to the portraits and topic of his dead wife are the still-lively grief of a man whose beloved wife died when he was away on vital business and couldn't get home in time to be at her bedside. Our heroine realizes (after her dryly-sarcastic boyfriend points it out) that dark, tragic secret crimes might be possible in isolated manors in southern France of the mountains of Italy, but in midlands England, where everyone is all over his neighbor's business and a servant can't sneeze without everyone in the county gossiping about their cold, and our legal system really doesn't go along with that sort of thing? Yeah, no.
The titular abbey turns out not to be the "romantic" ruin Catherine imagined it to be--her boyfriend's family has modernized and expanded the place, because it's where they live, and wealthy families don't camp in ruins. (It would appear Catherine missed the part in Udolpho where Montoni was having the castle repaired and modernized, too...) After seeing how many servants the general has to maintain the abbey, Catherine becomes skeptical of just how realistic her gothic novels are, that have one or two old servants maintaining an empty manor or castle.
Finally, Austen clearly disliked the bad romance trope mentioned in my remarks on Mysteries of Udolpho: stupid misunderstandings that persist for half the book that could be cleared up by five minutes of conversation. Several places she pointedly has Catherine NOT jump to the conclusion that someone's brother or sister who she has not met yet is their secret lover so they can have a big misunderstanding over it.
