Catherine Morland's Gothic Delusions: A Defense of "Northanger ...

Catherine Morland's Gothic Delusions: A Defense of "Northanger Abbey" 

Author(s): Waldo S. Glock 

Reviewed work(s): 

Source: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1978), pp. 

33-46 

Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 

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Catherine Morland's Gothic Delusions: 

A Defense ofNorthanger Abbey 

WALDO S. GLOCK 

The critical response to Northanger Abbey has been neither consistent 

nor entirely unambiguous. Most critics have recognized that a 

problem exists, a problem connected with the success or failure with 

which Jane Austen has integrated into the body of Catherine Morland's 

ordinary adventures a substantial element of Gothic burlesque. Although 

it is the third novel written by Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey was 

evidently less extensively revised than the early versions of Sense and 

Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. It therefore seems to contain more 

of Jane Austen's early work than the two earlier novels, and certainly 

the prominence given to the parody of Gothic romance links Northanger 

Abbey to such juvenile work as Love and Freindship. 

Numerous critics have insisted that the burlesque is imperfectly 

joined to the main narrative, with the result that Catherine's fantastic 

delusions at Northanger Abbey are regarded as deficient in logical 

connection with her earlier experiences at Bath. Her impressionable 

mind occasionally interprets scenes at Bath in the light of her reading 

of Gothic romance, and she succumbs to excited anticipations of viewing 

Blaize Castle; but-so the argument goes-none of these temporary enthusiasms 

quite prepares the reader for the excessive credulity with which 

Catherine becomes the victim of Gothic illusion at Northanger Abbey. 

The alteration in her character, the seeming use of her as a satiric 

device, without apparent regard for the principles of consistency and 

convincing reality, persuade many critics to question the structural 

unity of the novel. Jane Austen, they imply, surely would have purged 

her work of such youthful extravagances had she revised Northanger 

Abbey as extensively as she did Pride and Prejudice. 

Waldo S. Glock teaches at New Mexico State University. 

ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW 33

Typical of this kind of criticism is that of Anne Ehrenpreis in her 

introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of the novel. The 

formal relationship between the "Bath episodes and the Northanger 

experience is not comfortable, and Catherine's adventures at Northanger 

are not a natural consequence of her reading." Once Catherine has 

arrived at the Abbey, she no longer functions as an anti-heroine, but 

proceeds to behave as irrationally as a "conventional Gothic prima 

donna, basing absurd conclusions on the slightest evidence." She becomes 

a different person, a prey to morbid fantasies, and "There is no 

way to accept this shift in Catherine's character as psychologically convincing." 

1 In other words, Mrs. Ehrenpreis is arguing that the bu: lesque 

passages, especially Chapters v-ix of Volume II, are structurally and 

thematically opposed to the main plot in which Jane Austen depicts a 

young lady's entrance into the world. The Evelina theme is interrupted, 

and the aesthetic unity of the whole seriously damaged, by the author's 

playful insistence that Catherine is, in spite of the evidence of her unheroic 

nature, a romantic heroine after all. 

Similar critical detraction is widespread, and emphasizes the large 

number of readers who experience a sense of discomfort, even of dismay, 

at the apparent "breach in the imaginative continuity of Northanger 

2 Abbey." Catherine's deliberate pursuit of her Gothic illusions, according 

to McKillop, "jolts the story rather violently," connecting Northanger 

Abbey with Jane Austen's earlier efforts at crude burlesque. To 

Mary Lascelles the burlesque pattern is "not subtly interwoven with 

the rest of the fabric," largely because the relationship is tenuous 

between "Catherine's fancied and her actual adventures at the climax 

of the story."3 General Tilney's cruel dismissal, in other words, is 

neither caused by nor related to her extravagant misconception of him. 

The problem of unity, then, raises certain questions about the rela- 

'Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 

13 and 16. 

2Alan D. McKillop, "Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey," in Jane Austen: A Collection 

of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 60. 

3Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 

59 and 64. 

34 

A DEFENSE OF NORTHANGER ABBEY

tion of part to part, and of theme to aesthetic intention, that suggest the 

impropriety of applying naturalistic or strictly logical standards to Jane 

Austen's novels. In life Catherine's Gothic delusions would make her 

seem a fool; in Northanger Abbey they stand forth as a symbolic and 

psychological flaw suggesting, but not logically accounting for, the 

artistic existence of a person otherwise unconvincingly inconsistent. Her 

primary fault, the Gothic infatuation that seems to disrupt the harmonious 

balance of the novel, becomes the symbolic mark of Catherine's 

charmingly enthusiastic enthrallment to the power of the imagination,4 

and to the persuasive power of literature to reconcile or transcend the 

commonplace logic of events. 

Even if we grant that Catherine's obsession is unbelievably irrational, 

and that her confusion of art with life is unacceptably naive, we must 

still remember that Jane Austen's practice suggests unequivocally that 

she is as much concerned with design and pattern as with reproducing 

the fabric of human life exactly as it exists in the external world. In 

such a novel, structure becomes meaning in the general sense that the 

principles of balance, contrast, and relationship facilitate the dramatic 

exposition of the theme of Catherine's growth into maturity and wisdom. 

The Gothic material, therefore, not only is integral to the themes of the 

novel, as pointed out by numerous critics,5 but also functions as part of 

an overall formal pattern that itself symbolically evokes those themes. 

The contrast between the Bath and the Northanger Abbey scenes, for 

4 The ambiguous effect of Catherine's delusions possibly accounts for the equally ambiguous 

nature of some critical comment: for example, A. Walton Litz, lane Austen: A Study of Her 

Artistic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 59, argues that the 

"Gothic elements are a brilliant commentary on Catherine's general character and behavior," 

and then depreciates the structural coherence of the novel by insisting that they form 

"detachable units." If the parody supports the general themes, one would suppose that it would 

be integral to the novel's total structure, even though possibly irrelevant to the plot. 

5See Litz, pp. 62, 67, and 175: "Certainly the Gothic sections of the novel support its 

general themes. . .." Yasmine Gooneratne, Jane Atlsten (Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1970), pp. 58 and 60-61; Andrew H. Wright, Jane Austen's Novels: A Study in Stric- 

ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 96 and 101; John K. Mathison, "Northanger 

Abbey and Jane Austen's Conception of the Value of Fiction," ELH, 24 (1957), 146-49; Frank J. 

Kearful, "Satire and the Form of the Novel: The Problem of Aesthetic Unity in Northanger 

Abbey," ELH, 32 (1965), 517; Sheridan Baker, "The Comedy of Illusion in Northanger 

Abbey," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 51 (1966), 548-49. 


example, measures the extent of Catherine's education, and constitutes 

a symbolic contrast between Deception and Revelation, between Catherine's 

childhood naivete and the disillusionment from which knowledge 

grows. In more specific terms, the parody of Gothic extravagance emphasizes 

meaning by symbolizing the part that fantasy plays in man's 

life, and the dangers of a too uncritical reliance on imagination unaided 

by judgment. Both parts of Northanger Abbey are thematically and 

structurally related, with contrasts of character, recurring motifs, and 

patterns of meaning representing a totality of form in which inconsistency 

of action is less injurious to the aesthetic equilibrium of the 

whole than it is to the pragmatic expectations of many critics. 

The theme of growth into knowledge and wisdom develops by way 

of contrasting layers of successive experiences, each contrasting variation 

on the theme affording a sense of balance and security to Jane 

Austen's novelistic world. The basic contrast is that between "the common 

feelings of common life" and "the refined susceptibilities, the 

tender emotions" that are characteristic of a heroine in romantic and 

sentimental fiction. The ambiguities involved in the contrast between 

the stereotyped heroine of fiction, which Catherine is not, and Catherine 

as the technical "heroine," even though a most unheroic one, of 

Northanger Abbey, are richly explored by the contrast between the Bath 

scenes and those at the Abbey, and lend to the story of Catherine's development 

an ironic dimension that deepens even as it extends the basic 

structural contrast. 

Catherine does become a heroine, a heroine of modern life. She embarks 

on life, the author tells us, under "unpromising auspices" (p. 19), 

with neither the accomplishments nor the expectations of a true heroine. 

There is nothing heroic about Catherine's nature or aspirations, and 

during the Bath episodes, even including her unexciting introduction to 

Henry Tilney, she encounters nothing other than what any ordinary 

young woman would normally experience. She is, in fact, the ordinary 

Woman of the nineteenth century, a creature of flesh and blood 

6 The Novels of lane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University 

Press, 1933), p. 19. Subsequent references to Northanger Abbey in the text are to Volume 

V of this edition. 

36 


comically presented in such commonplace circumstances as to assume 

a symbolic status representing all those unknown persons whose lives 

will be uneventful, desperate, and tedious; whose lives will be as 

vacuous and unimportant as that of the future Emma Bovary. Catherine 

does not turn out to be another Madame Bovary. But she seems at first 

to learn in the Abbey section of the novel, while trying to be a romantic 

heroine, that in the nineteenth century fantastic cruelty and extravagant 

adventures for their own sake exist only in second-rate novels. Evil 

exists, she soon discovers, but it is more often than not a calculating 

and low-spirited evil designed for such unexalted purposes as financial 

gain. In contrast to the sentimental heroine, Isabella Thorpe, whose 

sufferings are histrionically imitative of the Gothic ideal, Catherine 

endures her outrageous ejection from the Abbey with quiet and unobtrusive 

dignity: the modern, real heroine, in other words, suffers inwardly, 

in the depths of her being, eschewing grand and romantic 

gestures that have lost their connection with historic fact. 

The most significant function of the parody element is to suggest 

that the romantic and sentimental type of heroine is no longer relevant 

for the nineteenth century. It is Isabella, not Catherine, who most convincingly 

embodies the dangers of romantic illusion in the modern 

world, and whose transparent insincerity functions as a social equivalent 

of the equally false reality of the sentimental novel. She maintains her 

role of "heroine" at Bath, in other words, primarily because the deceptive 

values of sentimental fiction are essentially similar to the selfish and 

mercenary values of society. The treacherous conduct of General Tilney, 

significantly instigated by Thorpe's exaggeration of the Morland 

fortune, represents Jane Austen's indictment of a society that regards 

the Gothic novel as serious literature. Catherine, on the other hand, 

must learn a different kind of heroism. She represents the modern 

world of plain fact, a world in which common sense and sincere intention, 

not sentimental gestures and exaggerated artifice, must be allowed 

to define the essential quality of modern life. She is a democratic heroine 

who seeks, not honor or fame, but individual fulfillment. She wants a 

family and domestic tranquillity, and the love and respect of a husband 


whose marital integrity will anticipate the conventional orthodoxies of 

mid-Victorian morality. 

The first two chapters of Volume I constitute a parodic introduction 

to Northanger Abbey. They have the effect of establishing the substantial 

and inescapable fact of life's general commonness, and of 

defining both the moral milieu in which Catherine must learn to 

exist and the extent of Isabella's deviation from that world. The point 

of the Gothic scenes at Northanger, in fact, is to emphasize by contrast 

that Catherine cannot find happiness in fantasy and romantic 

retreat from reality; it can only be found in the acceptance of the general 

ordinariness of life, as epitomized by the witty and original, yet totally 

unromantic Henry Tilney. 

Jane Austen, of course, does recognize that a reciprocal relationship 

exists between life and literature, though she suggests that the relationship 

is never fixed or precise: Catherine attempting to emulate Emily 

St. Aubert is no less absurd, but much less dangerous, than Isabella, 

wrapped in the shimmering gown of romantic illusion, betraying James 

Morland for Captain Tilney. The opposition, however, is always complex: 

during the famous discussion of "horrid novels" in Chapter vi 

(Vol. I), Catherine exclaims that she would not have abandoned The 

Mysteries of Udolpho except to meet her dear friend, Isabella. Real life 

seems to draw her away from the illusionistic world of fiction, but the 

pervasive paradoxical structure of Northanger Abbey emphasizes the 

contrast with Catherine: Isabella's role-playing is as unreal as her appreciation 

and understanding of good novels. She has not read Sir 

Charles Grandison, "'an amazing horrid book'" (pp. 41-2) which she 

considers a subject of less importance than the clothes she is going to 

wear: "'But, my dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on 

your head tonight?'" The inversion of values implied by the juxtaposition, 

and especially the ironic implication that, given such a scale of 

values, even literature is more significantly "real" than Isabella's notion 

of what constitutes social life, emphasize the symbolic function of her 

"fictional" existence. Even her language in the Bath episodes anticipates 

her later treachery by its dishonest inability to represent the truth. Her 

continual inflation of sentiment is marked by an unimaginative depen- 

38 


dence on the word "amazingly," 7 a dependence that suggests the vacuity 

of a mind forever looking inward on itself, for whom real persons, such 

as Catherine, are objects to be used and manipulated. The contrast between 

appearance and reality is imbedded not only in the action but 

more subtly in the ironic complexity of the language. 

Catherine's failure to recognize Isabella's falsity is an aspect of her 

imaginative failure to embrace both worlds at once, the world of fiction 

and the world of tangible reality, in a rounded vision of life that comprehends 

the norms of common sense and the heights of creative aspiration. 

She therefore vacillates between the two poles of experience, not 

having learned the essential restraints and qualifications that prevent 

either the imagination or the reason from being regarded as the whole 

of life. When she attempts to play a role, to be "arch" by suggesting that 

Isabella is eagerly expecting James to appear in the Pump-room (pp. 

143-44), her aim misses; she has no experience in flaunting and repeating 

the romantic cliches of which Isabella's speech is generally composed. 

But at Northanger, when Catherine finally recognizes Isabella's heartlessness 

and insincerity, she refuses to imitate Isabella by playing an 

assumed role, and candidly confesses that she is not as much afflicted 

by Isabella's betrayal as she had expected. After Catherine awakens 

from the "visions of romance" (p. 199), she perceives the truth, that 

her delusions had been "voluntary" and "self-created," and that the "infatuation 

had been created, the mischief settled long before her quitting 

Bath" (p. 200) by her reading of romantic novels in which "perhaps" 8 

the truths of human nature were imperfectly reflected. Catherine, then, 

has abandoned one illusion that obscures the true nature of reality, her 

"self-created delusion" that Isabella is a genuine heroine; and she resolves 

to act and judge in the future with the "greatest good sense" (p. 201). 

The gradual revelation of the essential truth, that heroines of sensibility 

are largely "self-created" by an over-active imagination, parallels 

7When Catherine (p. 107) incorrectly uses the word, in a context that indicates she is 

mistaken in her belief that young men despise Gothic novels, Henry immediately points out 

the solecism: inaccurate thought is reflected in imprecise language. Catherine's linguistic dis- 

tortions are not the consequence of vanity or affectation. 

See Baker, p. 551, for a convincing demonstration that Catherine's belief that she has 

completely abandoned her illusions is itself a subtle form of self-deception. 


the transformation of Henry Tilney from "another version of Isabella 

herself" ' 

into a man of probity and common sense. In the Bath scenes 

he assumes a role, inconsistent with his real character, in order to entertain 

Catherine with displays of his knowledge and wit. He is a devotee 

of the Gothic novel, having "read hundreds and hundreds" (p. 107), 

and it is significantly he, not Catherine alone, who plays upon her 

"raised, restless, and frightened imagination" (p. 51) by describing" 'all 

the horrors that a building such as "what one reads about" may 

produce'" (p. 157). On the walk around Beechen Cliff he instructs her 

in the cult of the picturesque, insisting that a natural scene is beautiful 

only insofar as it is capable of "being formed into pictures" (p. 110). A 

view from the top of a high hill, she learns to her surprise, is unworthy 

of notice if it is incapable of picturesque arrangement. In other words, 

the picturesque also distorts reality, preventing a direct and pure appreciation 

of Nature just as Gothic exaggeration does not allow Isabella at 

Bath, or Catherine at Northanger, to exhibit essential human nature 

unalloyed by layers of pretense. But in Volume II Henry as well as 

Catherine learns a lesson from her infatuation in the Abbey and he 

henceforth represents for her the solidity of unadorned fact. His pose 

of a witty and sophisticated man of the world, a pose that intentionally 

sacrifices the truth to aesthetic theory or personal vanity, is abandoned 

as he recognizes its incongruity with one whose real feelings are "'most 

to the credit of human nature' " (p. 207). 

The Gothic novel, remaining popular throughout the 1790s, still 

retained sufficient vitality to provoke E. S. Barrett's burlesque, The 

Heroine, in 1813. No more apt or manageable symbol of the distortion 

of life for the sake of melodramatic and emotional effects, of the stultifying 

and futile pretense of an Isabella Thorpe, could have been selected 

at the end of the '90s when Northanger Abbey was first drafted. The 

Gothic novel was dishonest; that, after all, is the purpose of Jane 

Austen's satire, to point out that a real heroine of common life must 

display an honesty which scorns unnatural affectations. 

9Darrel Mansell, The Novels of lane Atsten: An Interpretation (New York: Barnes and 

Noble, 1973), p. 17. I am indebted to Mr. Mansell's perceptive study for several pertinent 

ideas. 

40 


The important point to notice-a point that bears directly on any 

defense of the Gothic chapters-is that Catherine's delusions have been 

carefully prepared for in the Bath episodes. The sight of Beechen 

Cliff reminds Catherine of southern France about which she has read 

in The Mysteries of Udolpho, and a projected visit to Blaize Castle stirs 

her imagination: she thinks of it as though it were Udolpho, and imagines 

that the sight of its walls "might console her for almost anything" 

(p. 86), though significantly not for the disappointment of not going 

for a walk with the Tilneys. Already she is succumbing to the temptation 

of identifying objects and situations in life with those of which she 

has read; already in Volume I she is supposing that the world of Gothic 

fiction possesses a reality almost as significant as that of real life. In 

Volume II she is thrilled by thoughts of Northanger Abbey, and when 

she actually spends a night amidst its ancient walls, and observes the 

cabinet and ebony chest of which she supposes Henry to have spoken, 

she falls almost but not completely under the spell of her inflamed 

imagination. The most consistently sustained delusion is that which 

concerns General Tilney, and even that fanciful misapprehension has 

its origin in Catherine's sense at Bath that he is a formidable and daunting 

personage. The delusions at Northanger Abbey are the climax, only 

because the Abbey provides the greatest stimulation to Catherine's 

imagination, of her tendency to allow her vision of life to be colored 

by her reading. The most famous example occurs during the walk 

around Beechen Cliff, when Catherine suddenly remarks during a 

political discussion that she has heard that "'something very shocking 

indeed, will soon come out in London'" (p. 112). Eleanor naturally 

supposes that Catherine refers to a political riot, and her astonishment 

when she learns of her error marks the contrast between unrestrained 

romanticism and nineteenth-century realism. As Henry correctly reminds 

Eleanor, the anticipated riot exists only in her own brain, since 

Catherine's reference is only to a new Gothic novel that will shortly be 

published. He ridicules the possibility of a riot in London and implies 

that it could never happen in England. The proof that Henry can be 

mistaken, that evil does exist in England, is emphatically demonstrated 


y the events at Northanger Abbey which culminate in the General's 

gratuitous act of cruelty. 

Henry at first seems to be justified in his assurance, for the Gothic 

episodes seem to imply that evil-violence, murder, rapine-is largely 

illusory in nineteenth-century England, a product more of a diseased 

imagination than of general probability. Perhaps, as Henry admonishes 

her when he discovers her searching Mrs. Tilney's apartment, such 

atrocities as she imagines the General to have committed could not occur 

in the nineteenth century, in a civilized country like England: "'Remember 

that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own 

understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation 

of what is passing around you-Does our education prepare us for such 

atrocities?'" (p. 197). The answer Jane Austen provides is two-fold: 

such violence and insecurity can indeed arise, even in tranquil and 

law-abiding England, from the unrestrained fantasies of one's own 

mind and the terrors of the subconscious; or they can be caused by the 

heartless self-interest of a General Tilney who represents a society for 

whom money has replaced honor as a guiding principle. 

Life seems secure and propertly protected: such is the popular opinion 

of the complacent reader as well as of Henry Tilney, a belief that Jane 

Austen ironically wishes to suggest is itself illusory. Her intention 

requires the inclusion of the Gothic chapters. That Catherine is not, in 

fact, quite so much in error as the Gothic burlesque would seem to imply, 

is one of the critical insights that have recently contributed to our 

greater understanding of Jane Austen.'? Her strategy is one of gradually 

increasing the insistency of the message. She first has Henry insist that 

no rational person would imagine that such horrors could exist outside 

of a circulating library novel (p. 113)-a point of subtle selfmockery 

since Henry often functions as the author's mouthpiece. Second, 

she has Catherine prove, by her supposing that life reflects secondrate 

literature, that there are sensible and rational persons such as 

10 See, for example, Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 207; 

D.W. Harding, "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen," in lane Austen: 

A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 

pp. 167-68; Mathison, p. 149. 

42 


Catherine herself who can, momentarily and wholeheartedly, give way 

to the most fantastic suppositions under the combined influence of an 

over-stimulated imagination and cooperating circumstances (in this case, 

an old abbey). Third, Jane Austen proceeds to hint that, beneath the 

appearance of tranquillity of English society, " 'every man is surrounded 

by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies'" (p. 198). The suggestion ironically 

undercuts Henry's confident belief in the orderliness and security 

of English civilization, and anticipates the revelation of the full horror 

of which a commercial society is capable. Finally, with great explicitness, 

Jane Austen emphasizes her main point, that Henry is mistaken in his 

argument that fiction seldom reflects the realities of the everyday world: 

deceit and cruelty, almost rivalling those displayed in The Mysteries of 

Udolpho, do exist in common life. The Gothic episodes imply that evil 

is illusory, that literature is not life; but evil is now shown to be real. 

The unexpected irony is that Catherine, though mistaken in the means 

by which evil is manifested, is not so far from the truth, unbeknown 

to herself, as is Henry Tilney. 

Catherine is an "anti-heroine" who learns from the General's cruelty 

that common sense will not alleviate the real horror of ordinary life;1 

not even Mrs. Morland's good sense can find an effective antidote to 

Catherine's illness after her return to Fullerton. Unlike Isabella, who 

wretchedly entertains the illusion that she can resume her affair with 

James, Catherine sadly accepts her altered circumstances, and does not 

attempt to be other than she was three months earlier, a sincere and 

humble person without pretension and without vain ambitions. The 

essential difference is that now, returned to Fullerton after experiencing 

the purgatorial humiliation of being driven forth from Northanger 

Abbey, from the world of childhood fancies and make-believe into the 

world of "actual and natural evil" (p. 227), she has endured the pain of 

real life. She now is no longer "free from the apprehension of evil as 

from the knowledge of it" (p. 237). 

Her expulsion from Northanger symbolizes the sudden and almost 

traumatic experience of maturing, of losing her innocence. Returned to 

" Cf. Wright, p. 101: ". . . she learns that good sense cannot deal with the crisis that 

has forced her sudden expulsion." 


her place of birth, having learned to love and be loved, Catherine is now 

prepared to begin adult life unencumbered by the fascinating yet irrelevant 

dreams of Gothic romance. All forms of falseness, of unreality are 

rejected in favor of intrinsic goodness; and even the reader is chastised 

for his delusion, the belief that Northanger Abbey is a mirror or transcript 

of life. Jane Austen's narrative technique, exploiting conscious 

and ambiguous irony, comically undercuts the apparently "objective" 

reality even of Catherine herself. The effect of the frequent authorial 

interruptions, as in the airy dismissal of the moral tendency of the work 

as either recommending parental tyranny or rewarding filial disobedience 

(p. 252), is to break the illusion that the created fictional world is 

real; it prevents the reader's ever confusing life and literature for long, 

and therefore stresses, by warning the reader not to succumb to Catherine's 

mistake, the extent of her misunderstanding of the real nature 

of the imagination. Symbolically Catherine has violated the integrity 

of the artistic imagination-its self-sufficiency, its freedom from absolute 

domination by real life-by naively supposing an identity between literature 

and life. For that sin she must be driven forth, an Eve of the 

creative power, from the Abbey, from the physical embodiment of 

Gothic romance amidst the commonplace reality of early nineteenthcentury 

England. Good does emerge paradoxically from evil. From the 

darkness of the Abbey, from the delusion that the Gothic novel's simple 

reduction of human nature into stark contrasts of good and evil is an 

accurate representation of the world about her, she emerges into the 

sunlight of nineteenth-century rationality. Reason may seem the epitome 

of unexciting mediocrity, but without rational control of the imagination 

no sane and life-enhancing art, even that of Northanger Abbey's 

Gothic parody, is possible. 

The ultimate paradox, in fact, resides in the contrast between form 

and content. The theme of the novel emphasizes the attractions of the 

real world, of common experience and unromantic aspirations, and the 

need for Catherine to abandon the illusions of immaturity; yet her experiences 

are so consciously ordered and selectively rendered as to underline 

the contrary attraction of the world of art. Northanger Abbey asks 

the question: Which is more real, the implied real world in which an 

44 


Isabella can prefer "'my yellow gown, with my hair done up in braids"' 

(p. 118) to her false love for James Morland to whom she has "irrecoverably" 

lost her heart, or the "unreal," fantastic, totally improbable 

world of suspicions and delusions to which Catherine succumbs in a 

"Gothic" novel? Isabella is so obviously an "unreal" figure even in the 

world of sentimental fiction, so obviously in her total presentation such 

a devastatingly shallow imitation of any real person, that insofar as she 

may stand for the non-fictional world of empirical reality she emphasizes 

by contrast the intensely "living" existence of Catherine Morland. 

Catherine, the product of the art of parody, of the imaginative arranging 

and distorting of life for the sake of artistic effect, is more "real" finally 

even with her delusions than the described world of external reality 

represented by Isabella. The paradoxical contrast suggests that art, the 

great illusion, is more "real" than real life. The final effect, perhaps the 

real meaning of Northanger Abbey, is to emphasize the integrity and 

importance of the literary imagination. 

The meaning of Catherine's adventures, including her Gothic aberrations 

at Northanger, is indissolubly a part of the formal structure of 

the novel. Without the dual form in which pairs of opposites are 

dramatically illustrated, especially the contrast between reason and 

imagination, the growth of wisdom and experience in Catherine Morland 

would be not only incomplete but also formally chaotic and therefore 

aesthetically meaningless. In the penultimate chapter, where the 

contrast between romance and common life is repeated from Chapter ii 

(Vol. I), Jane Austen achieves a resolution of the antithesis between 

Gothic romance and the reality of everyday life in the achievement of 

her own novel: Gothic extravagance does have a place in literature if it 

serves an aesthetic rather than an empirical function. She seems to banish 

romantic material from the novel in the comic finality of Catherine's 

humiliation, but ironically allows it a legitimate existence by the formal 

success with which she has employed the Gothic episode. 

The synthesis of opposites is significantly exposed in the final scenes 

at Fullerton, for in them it is all too plain that neither common sense 

nor unrestrained fancy has been sufficient to bestow happiness on 

Catherine. Henry Tilney, having become the man of rational self- 


control, must rescue her from languishing inaction before she attains 

perfect contentment. Earlier at Bath common sense does not permit her 

to see that the General is cruel and self-interested, or that Isabella is a 

shallow social climber. At Northanger Catherine's youthful imagination, 

unwisely fed on a diet of Gothic novels, persuades her that Gothic 

terror co-exists with mundane reality in the midlands of England, a 

belief that ironically suggests by contrast with Tilney's opinion the 

greater insight of the imagination. Reason and judgment, therefore, 

must control imagination by insisting on the possible and the probable. 

Only by her dismissal from Northanger Abbey, a paradise of the 

imagination so removed from reality as to be essentially innocent or 

amoral, can she acquire that experience of the wholeness of life without 

which sturdy common sense and pure imagination are equally futile. 

The final conclusion is almost that there is no conclusion, that the 

shifting spectrum from life to art is so amorphous and uncertain in its 

multiple ambiguities that art becomes both a reflection of, and an antithesis 

to, the reality of external life in which the only supreme moment 

is the transcendence of the commonplace by the controlled imagination 

of the artist. Neither art nor life is secure from Jane Austen's irony: an 

irony, in fact, that turns round on itself, and mocks the mockery of the 

ironist herself. 

46

Catherine Morland's Gothic Delusions: A Defense of "Northanger ...

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