Northanger Abbey & Emma (Jane Austen)
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1. Northanger Abbey demonstrates from its opening sentence that it will provide a critique of received wisdom about a whole range of conventions of social and moral history. There is on one hand a mockery of the myth, or more exactly the stereotype, of the category of individual known to the world as the heroine. On the other hand, there is a mockery of how the stereotype is designated in history (but especially literature). On what might be called a third hand, there is a mockery of readers who may pattern their moral sensibilities, if not the actions of their lives, on the specious realities of melodramatic stereotype, even as they programmatically misinterpret pretty good literary form and content, mistaking ironic intent for actual meaning. Such is the presentation of Catherine Morland's personal history and psychology in the first chapter of the novel. It is typical of histories to record deeds of what this or that great person has done. Austen mocks this stereotypical presentation by putting an ironic construction on the explanation of her heroine, whom she describes almost exclusively negative terms: "Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her" (367). If the experience of reading about the extraordinarily gifted, beautiful, and exotic heroines of gothic novels is brought to Northanger Abbey, then the description of Catherine as a more or less average kid from a more or less av
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s of gothic narrative have to the perils of external reality. Catherine seeks manifestations of melodrama in a world she perceives as like the gothic universe inasmuch as new experience is always experience on the brink of adventure. What she discovers is that the real perils and adventures of life are located, not in physical danger, but in unexplained human behavior in the smaller things, and that psychic terror can motivate decent or mean spirited actions every bit as much as gothic psychosis or heroism. One could even infer that the reality of history is not located in stories of great and near great persons but in the experience of ordinary ones.
2. In Emma the decisive moment at which the language of subjectivity and social intercourse has the greatest analytical (and emotional!) impact occurs toward the end of the outing at Box Hill. The party comprising Emma, Mr. Knightley, Harriet, the Westons, the Eltons, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, and Miss Bates is goaded by Frank Churchill into a truth game: "Miss Woodhouse," says Frank, "only demands from each of you, either one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeated; or two things moderately clever; or three things very dull indeed; and she engage
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Approximate Word count = 2503
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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